Scientific Management - Essay Example

Scientific management therefore is also considered as one of the earliest attempts to actually apply scientific methods on engineering processes and the management. Taylor offered four important rules which form the basis of the scientific management and are still considered as important contribution towards the overall theory of management. It is however, important to understand that as the industrial advancement took place and more and firms entered into the market, the overall ideas on management and their application in real life situations started to change.

With the passage of time, new and more innovative methods of management and labor productivity were introduced which rendered scientific management only as a discipline limited to industrial engineering. Many therefore argue that scientific management has particular relevance for the modern day organizations and has no present day significance. Scientific management as a discipline started to emerge in the 19th century when industrial revolution started to take place. Industrial revolution necessitated the use of best practices for utilizing the skills of the labor to their maximum.

It advocated the use of optimizing ways in which tasks are to be performed in most efficient manner and tasks are simplified enough that labors could be trained to perform various sequences of the tasks easily.( Smith, & Boyns,2005) Prior to the introduction of scientific management, work was mostly performed by the craftsman holding monopoly over the way their skills were traded and how they decided to perform their jobs. Scientific management however, took a step further and converted the jobs into series of simple tasks which can be easily performed by training any skilled and semi-skilled workers.

The overall purpose of scientific management therefore was to ensure that jobs are simplified and further training can be imparted so that tasks can be