Theoretical Analysis of Scientific Management and its Principles

Task:

Despite the strong critics of scientific management, in the right circumstances the four [4] underlying principles still have relevance and much to offer to contemporary organizations. It is just that many reviewers appear reluctant to openly admit that this is the case’! What are your views? Where scientific management could be applied for the best overall effect?

1.0 Introduction

2.0 Theoretical Analysis (Scientific Management and its Principles)

The late 19th C was known by the increasing of industrial organizations in different areas in most parts of the world especially in western countries, the facts which made it more difficult to organise human effort efficiently and effectively (Rollinson, 2005: 9). As a result to contemporary trends, a systematic management movement was formed, which consisted of attempts by managers with engineering backgrounds to apply the principles of their discipline to the organization of production, with the objective of solving the problems of the industry with rational methods of managing (Barley & Kunda, 1992: 369).

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In this context, the Scientific Management theory was born, based on the work performed by Frederick Winslow Taylor during the latter part of the 19th century and further developed in the early 20th century (McKinnon, 2003: 1). Scientific Management “supplied the systematic management movement with coherent ideological foundation” (Barley & Kunda, 1992: 369) and it has become the most widely used set of general principles for organising production (Rollinson, 2005: 10). In addition, job analysis and design have its roots in Scientific Management and are now a common human resources practice in most of the world’s largest corporations (Bell & Martin, 2012: 107).

Scientific Management can be defined as “an organizational ideology and a set of techniques conceived to deal with such problems as soldiering by workers, resource waste, and disorder, as well as management’s arbitrariness, greed, and lack of control” (Guillen, 1994: 75). It consists of a series of tools, methods and organizational arrangements to increase the efficiency and speed of machine shop production, which involves, among others, a timing work system to establish a scientific measure of “what constitutes a fair day’s work” (Taylor, 1911:49), bookkeeping and accounting tools, and techniques to measure work input, as well as a managerial bonus plan devised by Gantt, a rule for the calculation of machine speeds by Barth and the “science” of motion study and all its branches developed by Frank and Lilian Gilbreth (Merkle, 1980: 2). It pretends to organise or reorganise work methods to give managers greater control over the labour process, that is, the exchange of effort for rewards (Rollinson, 2005: 9-10).

Taylor’s theory rests on the assumptions that “high pay is the main and perhaps the only thing that people seek to obtain for work” (Rollinson, 2005: 10), “people are primarily rational” (Barley & Kunda, 1992: 372) and a “belief in the utility and morality of scientific reasoning” (ibid). Following Rollinson (2005:10), Taylor was convinced that since both parties (workers and managers) obtained what they wanted (higher pay and maximum effort from workers), Scientific Management would lead to cooperation, “prosperity and a greater surplus for the organization” (Bell & Martin, 2012: 109). However, as Wagner-Tsukamoto (2007: 106) stated, opportunistic managers used the system to abuse and mistreat workers, and, after its last peak of fame in the 1920s, Scientific Management popularity decreased due to its consideration as the “science of exploitation” (Bakan, 2004: 76). After that time, an era of criticism and competition for the movement, characterised for willingness to collaborate with the labour (Hawthorne Studies, Human Relations Movement, etc) began (Barley & Kunda, 1992: 372).

I will now deal with the four Principles of Scientific Management and discuss the relevance of each in current management practices.

3.0 1. “The development of laws and scientific principles for work tasks to replace old-fashioned or traditional methods” (Boone and Bowden, 1987: 126).

With this Principle, Taylor wanted to “use scientific techniques to determine the most efficient way of doing work” (Morgan, 2006: 23), replacing the “role of thumb” method (Taylor, 1911: 36), that means, the one that is not accurate or reliable for every situation, and to simplify jobs by describing each worker’s task in detail, specifying how it should be done and the amount of time necessary to do it (ibid: 38-39). In essence, he arrogated that managers could find the “one best method” to perform a task that would guarantee maximum efficiency (Freedman, 1992: 27). Yet this point of view is nowadays rejected, because there is no “managerial best practice”, it all depends on the circumstances of the country, industry, and culture in which organizations operate (there are three eclectic models of management, and every new managerial practice seems to be a mixture of them) (Guillen, 1994: 75) and the organization’s world appears to be “unpredictable, uncertain and even uncontrollable” (Freedman, 1992: 26).

However, adapted to new technologies and modern practices, Taylor’s specialization of tasks, standardization and scientific improvement of processes are still alive in modern organizations, as it will be now exposed.

Firstly, big companies are often divided into several departments to focus on specialization, since the change in structure “allows them to divide the tasks of the whole organization into manageable sub-tasks and allocates them to organisational units that are responsible for their completion” (Rollinson, 2005: 461). However, when the organization’s structure does not include specialized jobs concerned with analysing the environment, the companies usually fail to adapt to changing circumstances (ibid: 463). So, scientific management works better with small companies which do not usually need to react to change (Caldari, 2007: 74). This lack of flexibility, the main defect attributed to the Fordism model (which adopted Taylorism’s Principles with just a different philosophy during 1960-1970) was the key word for the development of Post-Fordism (Caldari, 2007: 72).

Although it may seem that Post-Fordism, which emerged from the crisis of Fordism (Amin, 2008: 18), surged to challenge Fordism tenets, core principles of scientific management neglected under Fordism were implemented through the search of flexibility, applying rationalist ideas like standardization and efficiency (Crowley et al, 2010: 423). Thus, this movement is “perhaps more aptly termed Neo-Taylorist than Post-Fordist management” (Crowley et al, 2010: 422), which shows Taylorism still influences it a lot.

Secondly, every “standard operating procedure” has its basis in Scientific Management (Kanigel, 1996: 45). Many employees are trained to become machines in certain parts of their jobs to improve efficiency and profitability (Bell, 2012: 106) and standardization of tasks plays a big role in it. Two examples of this can be seen, as Bell and Martin (ibid: 107) indicated, when workers cook a hamburger at McDonald’s or when a technical support representative answers a call under pressure from a 90/10 protocol (which is a set of procedures that demands 90 percent of all calls to be answered within 10 seconds and 90 percent of all problems to be resolved within 10 minutes). Another one is Customer Service Representatives jobs, which for some are an “expression of an advanced form of Taylorism” (Holman et al, 2005: 116, citing Bain et al., 2002; Knights & McCabe, 1998; Taylor & Bain, 1999), because jobs are unskilled, repetitive and monotonous, and calls are of a short duration and required to be completed within a specified time (ibid).

Finally, about scientific improvement of processes in current organizations, we can see Post- Taylorism (another trend which was originated after the Scientific Management crisis and resembles its predecessor in many ways) companies not only look for cost, but also for efficiency, short delivery times and increased output (Peaucelle, 2000: 452). For that purpose, new organizational techniques, such as Just-In Time, Process Reengineering and Call Centres, have been created (ibid). The second one, for instance, involves rethinking and radical redesigning of processes to improve performance dramatically (Rollinson, 2005: 54).

4.0 2. “Scientifically select workpeople and progressively train, teach and develop them to achieve their maximum level of efficiency and prosperity in the jobs that are required” (Taylor, 1911: 36).

Taylor assumed everyone is “first-class at something” (Rollinson, 2005:10), which means there should always be a person who best suits a job and just has to be found. Because extracting the maximum effort of a worker resulted in boring and repetitive tasks, careful selection of operators (people who did not have aspirations for performing more “mentally-challenging” works) was required (Rollinson, 2005: 10).

Since World War I, personnel selection’s influence has grown enormously, and it has become a science in its own right (Locke, 1982: 17). In addition, most contemporary managers fully accept the notion that training new employees is their responsibility (Locke, 1982: 17). Taylor's emphasis on scientific selection was an impetus to the development of the fields of industrial psychology and personnel management (ibid), being one of the sources of theories like Contemporary Human Resource Management (CHRM) (Price, 2011: 8-9), one of the most dominant approaches to people management throughout the world (ibid: 3). CHRM´s responsibilities involve, among others, job design, staff selection, training and motivation and job performance criteria, all of which were Taylor’s contributions (Bell and Martin, 2012: 107).

Thus, following Taylor’s ideas, organizations in our days make huge efforts to “hire the right people to a position” and to train them to develop their skills (Mckinnon, 2010: 1). One example could be human resources policies in consulting firms, which focus on hiring unexperienced workers with great potential and, then, train and develop their skills so that they can make very valuable workers for a low cost (Babío et al, 2007: 50).

5.0 3. “Bringing the scientifically designed job and the scientifically designed workers together” (Rollinson, 2005: 9).

This Principle translates into ensuring that all work is done in accordance to the principles of the developed science. Even though the basic job of a manager is to guarantee that an organization achieves its goals, a key aspect to take into account is making sure that employees are performing their tasks so that they contribute to the accomplishment of organization’s goals (Certo, 2003: 3-4), and this involves monitoring performance and making the necessary corrections (ibid: 11).

Seeing that we cannot assure everything is done as it should be just by establishing an efficient way to do it, supervision seems basic and crucial to modern organizations, as it is performance appraisal, which also has its roots in Scientific Management (Bell & Martin, 2012: 107).

6.0 4. “Divide up the actual work of the organisation between management and workers” (Rollinson, 2005: 9).

Here, Taylor wanted to separate the “thinking” (planning and controlling tasks, performed by the managers, the superior part of the organisation) from the “doing” (the more menial physical tasks, carried out by workers) (Rollinson, 2005: 10). By that way, soldiering, “the practice of working as a much slower pace than the one of which a person is capable of” (ibid), will be tackled, since workers would carry out their tasks efficiently because the responsibility of “thinking” would have been removed (ibid).

However, following this thoughts, organizations were viewed as a machine in which processes were considered important, whereas workers were treated as passive elements of them (Burrell & Morgan, 1979: 127.). This resulted in dehumanizing employees (Morgan, 2006: 28), which led to discouragement of workers, a decline in job satisfaction and numerous strikes (Rollinson, 2005: 10). Consequently, efficiency decreased and workers were “denigrated” and “deskilled” (Nyland, 1996: 985).

Nevertheless, this separation somehow happens in modern organizations, since usually, in large businesses, the head (directors) attends to general strategic matters such as setting the direction of the organization (“thinking”) while all the remaining work is attended to by the other departments (“working”) (Caldari, 2007: 67). Furthermore, scientific managers of today must behave a bit like Taylor, studying their own organizations and designing processes to make their workers effective perform in our times of rapid change (Freedman, 1992: 37, citing Senge, 1990).

Beyond the four principles, there are other trends related to the matter and important to mention. These are Total-Quality Management (TQM), Knowledge Management (KM), Lean Production (LP) and Management By Objectives (MBO). The first and the second can be described, respectively, as “a comprehensive, organisation-wide effort that is an integrated and interfunctional mean of improving the quality of products and services and of sustaining competitive advantage” (Holmann et al, 2005: 2), and a “the use of practices, particularly IT-based technologies and community and network-based practices to centralise, collectivise and create knowledge so that it can be exploited to increase organisational performance and to develop new opportunities” (ibid). The third and the last can be defined as “an integrated system of production with a single production flow that is pulled by the customer and emphasis on small batch manufacture, just-in-time, team-based work and participation, to eliminate non-value-adding activities and variabilities” (ibid) and “a process whereby the superior and subordinate managers of an organization jointly identify its common goals, define each individual’s major area of responsibility in terms of result expected, and use these measurements as guides for operating the unit and assessing the contribution each of its members” (Kondrasuk, 1981, citing Odiorne, 1979).

TQM is notably influenced by Taylorism, since its work is sometimes designed and deliberaly organized to put pressure on employees to produce every second (Rollinson, 2005: 32), reduces worker’s autonomy (ibid) and incorporates many Scientific Management ideas related to process management and structural reorganization (Guillen, 1975: 75). KM, employed as a strategy of consultancy companies like Accenture or Deloitte (Willson, 2002: 1), has its roots in Taylor’s Scientific Management (ibid), although it encompasses a wide range of different approaches and it is a much broader-based movement than Taylor’s theory (Holmann et al, 2005: 134). LP includes the “practice of the organizational principles of Fordism under conditions in which management prerogatives are largely unlimited”, and represents “an extension of the sphere of influence of scientific management.” (Guillen, 1994: 75, citing Dohse et al., 1985). Finally, MBO “did not go beyond the principles of Scientific Management, because managers who applied it were unwilling to reverse Taylorism, surrender power and synthesize planning and performing” (Waring, 1992: 235). Yet this author went beyond that and portrayed MBO as a “reborn and transformed Taylorism” (ibid: 236).

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