Fredrick Taylor and Abraham Maslow

Fredrick Taylor and Abraham Maslow

Changes take place in any industry which is going through a stage of development and change. Telecommunication electronics is in such a phase now and it is natural for this industry to be changing. In this context, changes have to take place in both attitudes of working by people as also their mentality for getting the work done.

The change in humans and their inter-relationships are not constant, but change from time to time.

The methods of change in Frederick Taylor's management theory are on making changes so that a worker can provide more production though his efforts. (Frederick Taylor Scientific Management) He was not worried about this from a personal point-of-view as he began this as an exercise for the benefit of the country and the concern was for the nation. He said "We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of 'national efficiency' are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated." (The principles of scientific management)

Then he tries to provide the solution in the wrong approaches of men to work by saying "It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom some one else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency." (The principles of scientific management) Thus the clear effort that he is trying to provide the problem of the country due to the lack of effort in management of men and this prompts him to say "To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lie in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man." (The principles of scientific management)

Then he comes out with his thesis of good management and what is it? "The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee." (The principles of scientific management) Is the situation still valid today for such assumptions? Then the definition is given what he means through maximum prosperity of the employees and that is "In the same way maximum prosperity for each employee means not only higher wages than are usually received by men of his class, but, of more importance still, it also means the development of each man to his state of maximum efficiency, so that he may be able to do, generally speaking, the highest grade of work for which his natural abilities fit him, and it further means giving him, when possible, this class of work to do." (The principles of scientific management) At the same time, he keeps harping on the desire of workmen not to do as much work as he can do but try and achieve as little as he possibly can. "When the same workman returns to work on the following day, instead of using every effort to turn out the largest possible amount of work, in a majority of the cases this man deliberately plans to do as little as he safely can -- to turn out far less work than he is well able to do -- in many instances to do not more than one-third to one-half of a proper day's work." (The principles of scientific management)

Thus there is a clear distinction between the workers and management according to him, but please remember that this was written in 1903 and then many of the workers were different from the managers and owners even in their language, style of talking, etc. In short, quite a few of the workers were treated as sub-human, and the revolution in Russia had still not occurred. He himself writes about a person that he chose "Finally we selected one from among the four as the most likely man to start with. He was a little Pennsylvania Dutchman who had been observed to trot back home for a mile or so after his work in the evening about as fresh as he was when he came trotting down to work in the morning." (The principles of scientific management) It is not needed to think that the concept or ideas of thinking about workers can get any thing done today. Often enough the workers in Telecommunication electronics are highly educated in electronics, but are short on funds which makes them workers and not owners. It has also been seen that many of the workers have later become owners through use of their intelligence as principal capital.

However, that was not the idea with Frederick Taylor and he wrote "It will be shown later in this paper that doing away with slow working and 'soldiering' in all its forms and so arranging the relations between employer and employee that each workman will work to his very best advantage and at his best speed, accompanied by the intimate cooperation with the management and the help which the workman should receive from the management, would result on the average in nearly doubling the output of each man and each machine." (The principles of scientific management) In short he is convinced that workers deliberately work at slow speeds.

This begets the question as to why the workers work slowly. "The great majority of workmen still believe that if they were to work at their best speed they would be doing a great injustice to the whole trade by throwing a lot of men out of work, and yet the history of the development of each trade shows that each improvement, whether it be the invention of a new machine or the introduction of a better method, which results in increasing the productive capacity of the men in the trade and cheapening the costs, instead of throwing men out of work make in the end work for more men." (The principles of scientific management) This situation does not exist as even the workmen's unions are not present in many of the units for Telecommunication electronics. It is also an area where many different types of working have been prepared to help the workers work.

But, Taylor was convinced that he was right and he wrote "Under the best day work of the ordinary type, when accurate records are kept of the amount of work done by each man and of his efficiency, and when each man's wages are raised as he improves, and those who fail to rise to a certain standard are discharged and a fresh supply of carefully selected men are given work in their places, both the natural loafing and systematic soldiering can be largely broken up." (The principles of scientific management) He feels that it is his God given responsibility to make workers more productive and the methods of cheating are also peculiar to workers - "owing to the fact that the workmen in all of our trades have been taught the details of their work by observation of those immediately around them, there are many different ways in common use for doing the same thing, perhaps forty, fifty, or a hundred ways of doing each act in each trade, and for the same reason there is a great variety in the implements used for each class of work. Now, among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implements which is quicker and better than any of the rest?" (The principles of scientific management)

Let us understand that the type of work that he was talking about is not the same as is the situation today and most of his theories are not applicable. He had gone on with his experiments in what he had called "scientific management and wrote about it as "Perhaps the most prominent single element in modern scientific management is the task idea." (The principles of scientific management) Well the concept of dividing jobs into tasks exist even today, but the separation of different tasks to different men have now been removed and entire jobs are given to work groups as that is found to be more effective. However he did write about his methods and came to the conclusions with "The writer has given above a brief description of three of the four elements which constitute the essence of scientific management: first, the careful selection of the workman, and, second and third, the method of first inducing and then training and helping the workman to work according to the scientific method." (The principles of scientific management) One does not really know how much of this is practicable today.

Abraham Maslow was from a much later period and he did not set out to reform humans. He left it as saying that humans have five types of needs. All his sayings come from his book called Motivation and Personality that was released in 1943. The lowest level of needs is the physiological needs and these come from the human body and these are like air, warmth, food, sleep, stimulations and activity. On top of these needs are the security or safety needs like being away from threats and these needs are the strongest among children as they feel the greatest need to be safe. Then are the social needs like the love of family and friends. The next level of needs is those for ego or self-esteem. These demand that we have self-respect and get respect from others. The highest level of needs is those for self-actualization or fulfillment. These needs are prominent among people who have achieved all other requirements and have a healthy personality. These reflect in the forms of 'truth, goodness, beauty, unity, transcendence, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, justice, order and simplicity'. (Maslow's Hierarchy of needs: Deeper Mind) All the levels of need were placed by him on top of each other like a pyramid, starting from the first level up to the fifth level. There is no attempt here to judge a category of persons as having different mentality than another group. In short, he believed that all humans were born equal.

The hierarchy of needs and the specific needs within each were defined by him. In the first instance it was."..it seems impossible as well as useless to make any list of fundamental physiological needs, for they can come to almost any number one might wish, depending on the degree of specificity of description." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) Then came the second stage and the definition was "If the physiological needs are relatively well gratified, there then emerges a new set of needs, which we may categorize roughly as the safety needs, security; stability; dependency; protection; freedom from fear, anxiety, and chaos; need for structure, order, law, and limits; strength in the protector; and so on." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic)

It is clear that the third set was thought to be superior over the first two for he wrote "If both the physiological and the safety needs are fairly well gratified, there will emerge the love and affection and belongingness needs, and the whole cycle already described will repeat itself with this new center. The love needs involve giving and receiving affection. When they are unsatisfied, a person will feel keenly the absence of friends, mate, or children." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) The fourth level was thought by him to come only when the first three were satisfied for he wrote "All people in our society with a few pathological exceptions have a need or desire for a stable, firmly based, usually high evaluation of themselves, for self-respect or self-esteem, and for the esteem of others. These needs may therefore be classified into two subsidiary sets. These are, first, the desire for strength, achievement, adequacy, mastery and competence, confidence in the face of the world, and independence and freedom. Second, we have what we may call the desire for reputation or prestige defining it as respect or esteem from other people, status, fame and glory, dominance, recognition, attention, importance, dignity, or appreciation." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic)

The reasons for the fourth level of needs are also clearly explained by him as being from "Satisfaction of the self-esteem need leads to feelings of self-confidence, worth, strength, capability, and adequacy, of being useful and necessary in the world. But thwarting of these needs produces feelings of inferiority, of weakness, and of helplessness." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) The other side of the requirement of these needs is obvious and these are stated by him as "The most stable and therefore most healthy self-esteem is based on deserved respect from others rather than on external fame or celebrity and unwarranted adulation." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic) Then Maslow reaches to the highest level of needs in human beings and he states "Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he or she, individually, is fitted for. Musicians must make music, artists must paint, and poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What humans can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualization." (Maslow's Holistic Dynamic)

Now let us get back to the industry that we are concerned with, telecommunications electronics. There are expected growths in this industry during the period up to 2012, at 7% but this growth is lower than the general growth of less than 16% that is expected. (Telecommunications) The present salaries in the industry are also higher than the average in all industries. Thus there does not seem to be any great problem immediately in dealing with the workers, except that their development needs as clearly theorized by Abraham Maslow are not likely to be satisfied. In today's world, any tactics used by Taylor will leave very few workers for the job. The figures that we are talking about have been given by the government and are not likely to be wrong. The changes are coming in a different way and that is through the users becoming more and more independent. (How to get Ahead in the Communications Game)