“Scientific Management is an art of knowing exactly what you want your men to do and seeing that they do it in the best and cheapest way.”
Fredrick Winslow Taylor, popularly known as the “Father of Scientific Management” began his career as an operator and succeeded as chief engineer. During his career, he conducted various experiments that laid the foundation of scientific management. According to Taylor, if a work is evaluated scientifically, it is possible to find one best way to accomplish it.
Taylor believed that the employees can easily be motivated by money. Hence, he proposed the idea of “a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.” According to this new idea, if an employee fails to achieve adequate in a day, he/she did not deserve to be paid as much as other highly productive worker.
So, scientific management is considered as a thoughtful, planned and dual approach towards the management job.
Four Principles of Scientific Management
Taylor’s gave four principles of scientific management as:
- Substituting the way you work by “rule of thumb,” or using common sense. Instead he proposed to use the scientific method to study work and find out the most efficient way to accomplish specific tasks.
- Instead of assigning workers to any task, they should be given the jobs on the basis of their capability and motivation. Moreover, they should be trained to work at maximum efficiency.
- Monitor employee performance, give instructions and supervise them to ensure that they’re using the most efficient ways of doing job. .
- Managing the overall work between managers and workers where managers should spend their time training and planning, and workers performing their tasks efficiently.
Read Details of Principles of Scientific Management
Evaluation of Taylorism
Taylor’s Scientific Management Theory encourages that there is “one right way” to do something. Therefore, it is at odds with present approaches like MBO (Management By Objectives), BPR (Business Process Reengineering), and other similar tools. All these promote responsibility in individuals, and look for ways to push decision making through various levels of the organization.
