Taylorism or Scientific management is the name of the
approach to management and
Industrial/Organizational Psychology initiated by
Frederick Winslow Taylor.
Taylorism is often mentioned along with
Fordism,
because it was closely associated with mass production methods in
manufacturing factories. Taylor's own name for his approach was
scientific management. It relied upon time and motion study to
find the "one best method" i.e shorn of unrequired extra movements.
Taylor believed that productivity could be increased if "First Class
Man" (in his words) was used for the job. What he meant was people
differ in their abilities and one should select the proper person
for the job. The difference between the "first class" and the one
unsuited could be dramatic. Today we know all computer programmers
are not equal and the best ones can be as much as ten times better.
Also every job should have rest breaks so that the worker is not
tired. He proved this with the task of unloading ore. Workers were
taught to take rest during work and output went up. Today's army
uses it during forced marches - the soldiers are told to take a
break of 10 minutes for every hour. The human heart uses the same
principle - it takes a rest between beats and this is how it keeps
beating non-stop.
While this principle has a certain logic, in practice it has two
obvious deficiencies:
- it ignores individual differences; the most efficient way of
working for one person may be inefficient for another;
- it ignores the fact that the economic interests of workers
and management are rarely identical, so that both the
measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylor's
methods would frequently be resented and sometimes sabotaged by
the workforce.
This was recognised by Taylor and he said scientific management
can not work unless the worker benefits. In his view Management is
doing its job when the employees are paid higher than the normal
going rate in the industry. In his view management shall arrange the
work in such a way that one is able to produce more and get paid
more.
The practical problems caused by Taylorism led to its replacement by
the human relations school of management.
See also
List of production topics