A short REPORT On Frederick Winslow Taylor - Essay Example

He developed philosophies based on shop-management, earning him the title, “Father of Scientific Management.” In the steel company, Winslow had noted a trend among the workers. He noticed that some of the workers were lazy, and not working to their abilities. This had a negative effect on the output of work, therefore reducing the company productivity. This compelled Winslow to develop a task management system, which he used to handle work in an objective manner and determine the efficiency and productivity of work in the company.

This idea bore Winslow’s Principles of Scientific Management (NetMBA; “Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915)”). In 1911, Fredrick Taylor published his work, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor developed four principles to apply to work. This was after spending years doing different experiments to prove his principles. In the first principle, Taylor recommended that the rule-of-thumbs method in work, be replaced with new methods that employed scientific study of different work.

His second principle suggested that training of workers should not be left to be their individual responsibility. However, this responsibility should be left to the managers who should recruit, train, and ensure the active personal development of the workers, while ensuring the use of scientific methods. In the third principle, Taylor suggested that company management should perform a follow-up on the workers through their supervision, in order to ensure that the workers adhere to the prescribed methods, which are scientifically oriented.

In the last principle, Taylor recommended that the company workload should be equally distributed between the employers and the workers. However, the employer, who is the manager, will be charged with work involving scientific management of the company in planning work, while the employees are tasked with executing the tasks. Taylor’s scientific principles of management aimed at increasing productivity and efficiency of work. Instead of apprenticeship, scientific management called for segmentation of work into different parts that could be performed by different unskilled people after short trainings (Daft, 2009; Taylor, 2003; Taylor, 1947).

Taylor developed the term soldering to refer to the underperformance of workers, which he linked to the workers’ belief that if they work effectively, some of them risked losing their jobs. Underperformance of workers was also because of the poor wages they were subjected to. Employees therefore felt that effectiveness in their work would result in exploitation, as wages were not paid according to the workload performed. Finally, the rule-of-thumb method of working employed by workers was less effective as it resulted in low work output.

In his time studies, Taylor believed that every work type could be planned properly to increase its productivity. He however thought that his scientific management was more effective as compared to the old “initiative and incentive” method, which was used to motivate workers. His arguments were that, in the initiative and incentive method, the workers were only motivated and increased productivity, but the whole responsibility of planning and executing work was wholly left for them to perform.

On the other hand, the scientific management method provided the opportunity for both work productivity and work planning to be performed in the best ways by