Scientific Approach to Management in the Modern Organizations - Term Paper Example

Essay “Scientific management, Taylorism or the ical Perspective is a method in management theory which determines changes to improve labour productivity (wikipedia, 2007)”. Scientific management has its roots connected to the classical theories of management. “The classical school theorists went a step further. Not only did they seek to develop a comprehensive theory of management, but they also wanted to provide the tools a manager required for dealing with their organizational challenges. Within the classical school there is the bureaucratic management, administrative management and scientific management branches (Hartman S.W. 2007)”. Scientific management principals and tools were developed by emphasizing on extensive research and studies to provide a management solution to the managers who are considered as major stakeholders in the wellbeing of an organization. Fredrick W. Taylor is considered the pioneer in developing scientific management theories. He worked on the application of scientific methods to the labour management to improve their productivity. “He spent more than two decades passionately pursuing the ‘one best way’ for each job to be done (Robbins & Coulter, 2002)”. Scientific management call for the need of application of maximization of worker’s productivity by the application of appropriate and efficient work methodologies in the light of science, especially ergonomics. The industries at that time were production oriented and mass production, Fordism, and they required practices and procedure that were scientifically designed to optimize their work activities. Scientific Management is Useful and Still Relevant Fredrick Taylor, who is called the father of scientific management, was a self-made man with his professional career spent in working within a labour intensive environment. Prior to scientific management, “Taylor worked as an apprentice to a pattern-maker, and as a machinist. He later joined the Midvale steel company as a labor rising in eight years to chief engineer (Hartman S.W. 2007)”. He worked in that environment observing efficiencies in work practices and thus created a desire to work upon the improvement of working methods. Taylor worked for years to develop optimal work methods and developed four principles, called principles of scientific management. 1. He proposed to replace rule-of-thumb and traditional work practices with practices grounded on scientific studies of tasks. 2. Workers should be given proper training before appointing them to perform certain task rather than leaving the training and the method of work on their discretion. 3. Monitor and control workers to make sure that the scientifically designed work practices are being followed. 4. Any particular job should include equal contribution from managers as well as workers. Later Gantt and Gilbreth made some alterations in his theory but the basic theme remained the same. In addition, the idea was to break the tasks into simple and small parts and each part to be assigned to a particular person who has the capability and training to perform the task. “Standardization of tools and equipment, routing and scheduling, the issuance of instruction cards to the men, the training of the employee in the most improved and scientific ways of performing his work, the selection of men for jobs for which their physical and mental Make-up peculiarly fits them, more satisfactory systems for the management of stores all these are features which originated incidentally in the course of pursuing the first aim of scientific management (Drury, 1915)”. While working in his steel plant, he observed that workers deliberately tried to work slowly to kill most of their duty timings. Secondly, they wanted ‘workers to production required’ ratio to be high so that management always had to believe that more workers are needed to do the jobs, since they thought that management would fire them if they see increase productivity from workers. To study these behaviours and to devise the action plan for the remedy of this problem, Taylor conducted the “time study” analysis (Netmba, 2006). This helped him in determining the time to perform a particular job and the loopholes in the work procedures, which were actually causing the inefficiencies. “From knowing how long it took actually to perform each of the elements in each job, it would be possible...to determine a really fair days work (Priestley S. 2005)”. Scientific management approach is to break down a job into constituent parts. It is seen that doing so really improve the efficiency of the workers while the management doing the job of planning and work design decision. Scientific management’s idea to select capable and educated worker to do the job rather than selecting a worker with the ability to work and then leaving him with the job to devise the methodology of his own, also helped and motivated organization to the careful selection of their workers. "One of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles the ox...Therefore the workman is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work (Taylor 1998)”. Scientific approach requires that special care should be taken while selecting the equipments and tools used by organization for their workers to do the job. The idea was to work on the fact that under-stress or over-stress, both of them causes the inefficiency and results in lower output. As we see the use of accurately adjusted computer tables to provide, ease in working and reduce the strain that is caused otherwise. The design of transport vehicles is also another example. The placement of door handles, the slope of stairs etc are some perfect examples of incorporation of efficient equipments and instruments to provide ease in work. The addition of careful selection of workers for a particular type of job was because not everyone is able to perform every job. Today we see specialization of job is the key issue in the discussion among mangers. In previous days, a mechanical engineer was the engineer who also had to design the job as well as to look after the machine maintenance. Today we see special maintenance mechanics are hired for machine maintenance while engineers work in the designing and planning. The standardization of processes is also a feature of scientific management. Most efficient methods are to be designed and then efforts are made by organizations to help their labor and staff sticks to them. McDonald staff’s example is a famous example quoted by many authors in this regards. "It told operators... precise cooking times for all products and temperature settings for all equipment...It specified that French fries be cut at nine-thirty-seconds thick...Grill men...were instructed to put hamburgers down on the grill moving left to right, creating six rows of six patties each (Ritzer, 2000)”. We still see the effects of these century back theories of management in our daily lives today. The car manufacturing plants, the integrated chip making industries, the fast-food retail outlets, the queue management in large shopping marts, all are possible due to the application of scientific management approach. If we see the manufacturing plants in china, we see that they believe in high specialization of job and extreme focus on work standards. Scientific approach to management also takes intro account the idea of mass production, the idea that was proposed by Henry Ford and known as Fordism. The rationale behind this was to attain this higher production output by employing labor to a particular task so that he could gain expertise in doing his part of work by repetition. These kind of jobs are usually incentive based and usually it is given in a per piece form. This encourages workers to work to increase their working speed, which ultimately results in the increase of total productivity of the plant. This is exactly what McDonald’s do. It specifies a job to the person and let him gain the expertise by sticking to his job so that the speed of production may increase. Their process line has uniformity all over the world to make their workers capable of adopting any environment anywhere in the world. Scientific management also have an advantage because it creates an environment of challenge within an organization, where the managers try to test worker’s ability by giving them targets for production while the workers push their limits to exceed manager’s expectations. The top management gives the middle management a cost budget and a maximum wastes allowed target and the managers then try to employed scientific approach to target achievement to attain efficiency for the increase in production and reduction in waste. Scientific Management is Incomplete and Irrelevant Modern organizations and their work practices sometimes go beyond the scope of scientific management. If scientific approaches have some strength, it also has some weaknesses attach to it, which cannot be overlooked in anyway, and these weaknesses make their case weak when we talk about implementing them in organizations operating on modern management practices. The major weakness of scientific management, as critics describe, is that they ease down the workers when it come to sharpening their skills. Assigning a small job and make the worker stick to it for a long period let them feel at ease and they doesn’t try harder to enhance their skills. In fact, it is said that scientific approach kills the lust of learning from workers and they continue to stick to a monotonous job for longer period. They become habitual to do the same work repeatedly which removes the element of any development in their jobs. People these days have become more aware of their self-respect and their rights. They demand more than just monetary rewards for their efforts and their presence in an organization. The employers these days are expected to provide their employees something more than just the economic rewards. Now worker wants diverse training and activities along with their jobs, which can hone their skills and enhance their capabilities in future. One of the negative implications attach with the adoption of scientific approach is the compromise on quality. People try to achieve quantity targets to attain rewards and recognition from management. However, this target achievement make them overlook the quality factor attach to every production process. Managers on the other hand become authoritative and dictators in the presence of scientific approach to management and they treat their employees no more than like a machine. Workers also sometimes do not work at their full capacity just to save themselves from big target, which they would get if they show their full efficiency. The technology advancement these days that are used by modern organizations require them to integrate different department and employees to work together. Global organizations like P&G, Unilever and Banks like Standard Chartered or Citi Group cannot let their staff work on monotonously on a particular piece of task over the employees. They foster team management and encourage their employees to work with other employees for creation of synergy that helps in better quality output. Modern organizations are facing a lot of competition from other organization, domestically as well as globally. They require moving from well-defined procedural approach to a much more flexible way of doing things so that they may enable themselves to compete in this dynamic environment. The organizations themselves require their employees to work for different jobs and task after certain interval of times and this is done as they think it brings out the true potential of their employees and they become able to contribute positively to the welfare of organizations. Scientific approach to management also halts the process of learning, development and adaptability among employees and employees stick to single routine job without trying and preparing themselves to work in new situations. Conclusion Scientific management though has become a little weak to incorporate all the requirements of modern work practices and the dynamism of environment, still is considered by many as the most relevant approach to understand the basic working of an industry and a mean to achieve production with limited resources. Managers at one hand become stronger in their authorities while employees become a tool in the hand of managers to use them in the way they want. It takes up the basic rights from the employees, which nowadays enable employees to have a say in their job design. To conclude the argument we can say that scientific approach to management is never seen employed in any of the modern organization as a complete management system due to the complexity of their system and their need of flexibility. Still some strengths of scientific approach such as the division of work between worker and management, deviation form the traditional work practices and discretion of worker to formulate the procedure to a standardized approach of job completion and the attainment of efficiency through uniformity of job has enabled it to still acquire some places in modern organization. In addition, we still see some organizations employing scientific approach to management partly in their practices. Bibliography Drury, (1915). Scientific Management; a History and Criticism. Published by New York Columbia University. Hartman S.W. (2007). Management Theory. Retrieved on February 19, 2007: http://iris.nyit.edu/~shartman/mba0120/chapter2.htm Netmba, (2006). A Fredrick Taylor and Scientific Management. Retrieved on February 18, 2007: http://www.netmba.com/mgmt/scientific/ Ritzer, George, (2000). The McDonaldization of Society. Sage Publications Inc. Pp-38. Robbins & Coulter, (2002). Management. 7th edition. Published by Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-031965-1 Taylor, Frederic. (1998). The Principles of Scientific Management. Re-Published. Originally published in 1911. Dover Publications. Wikipedia, (2007). Scientific Management. Retrieved on February 19, 2007: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management Read More