Reflections on management principles and practice

¶ … Scientific Management

Taylor believes that all employees are motivated by the need to earn more money: he promotes the concept of "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work." This means employees do not deserve to be compensated much like other workers who were highly productive when they cannot put up more effort or realize their potential in any given day. However, he is interested in efficiency. This led him to conduct various experiments to establish optimal performance levels in the workplace. In his experiments, he applied scientific methods to identify the optimal methods of doing any workplace task. Eventually, he established that people could develop better ways of completing tasks by estimating the time required for the numerous elements of a task. The initial observations of Frederick Taylor concerning the working practices by skilled employees arise from his previous observations around productivity. He believes that employees deliberately operate below their maximum efficiency and capacity. Taylor refers to this as soldiering because of three basic principles (Taylor, 1912).

The time and motion experiments led Taylor to contend that some people can work more efficiently than their counterparts can. According to Taylor, managers must hire such people where possible. As a result, workplace efficiency depends on the selection of the right people. Drawing from his experiments, Taylor created three basic principles, which are commonly referred to as "Taylorism."

First, employees believe that if they work more efficiently, fewer employees can complete the task and thus jobs would be lost.

Second, most remuneration systems imply that employees be paid equally regardless of how much they produced. Therefore, giving incentives to employees to show supervisors that their maximum job pace is low may be helpful. Even when workers were paid based on their productivity, they still believe that an increase in their overall output would encourage managers to set new standards, leading to a decrease in productivity bonus (Taylor, 1912).

Lastly, Taylor believes that the majority of employees use any method they are accustomed to instead of using the optimal method of work that might be determined by motion studies of the work and scientific time.

Scientific management at work in your public agency

At City Hall, all the above issues have been overcome by the management through taking responsibility for enhancing the productivity of employees. The management also believes in the scientific study of individual behaviors related to each task and how these behaviors can be efficiently organized. Drawing from Taylor's principles, this is the best way for City Hall to plan work that attempts to motivate employees, as such incentives places responsibility on the employees to increase productivity (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2010). As a result, managers at City Hall have no input. Therefore, the management applied motion studies and scientific time to establish time taken for each task and how the task can be performed efficiently.

"Schein's level of organizational culture" to my public agency

At City Hall, organizational culture is the prime factor in providing the ease to continue embracing the risks of change and being innovative. It also hugely affected how effective the organization recruits new employees, externally and internally, to the firm's new approaches. Because of its subterranean and pervasive nature, Schein suggests three levels on which the organizational culture establishes its presence:

Artifacts

Culture artifacts include the visible items in the organization like the technology, physical environment, and manifestations, which are clear and necessary. The environment of City Hall is an artifact of deeper cultural levels comparable to the visible behavior of the employees. Thus, technology is the visible behavior of City Hall's culture. In the organization's research and development division, its employees are working to minimize emission and energy consumption in the course of production. This means that efforts are focused on areas such as infrastructure (Taylor, 1912).

Values