Taylor\'s Contribution to Contemporary Management

Taylor's contribution to contemporary management thought and practice.

Taylor's Approach to Scientific Management: Taylor's contribution to contemporary management thought and practice.

The mechanical engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor is widely credited with formulating the first approach to scientific management of the industrial age. Taylor used the scientific method to define the one best way for a job to be done on a production line, rather than allowing deviations from a singular methodology during production. Thus Taylor is known as the father of scientific management, a theory that still has great cache and influence today in industry.

Taylor's Quaker Puritan background caused him to be "appalled at the inefficiency of workers." Rather, he stressed, employees should always use the same scientifically efficient techniques to do the same job." (Robbins, 2001) Taylor set out as his divine mission to correct the inefficiencies of excessive production costs manifest during the early years of this century. Taylor observed that when tasks were described unambiguously, and when the people performing them were made to follow these detailed instructions, human efficiency and factory productivity overall were increased. It should be noted that the tasks Taylor studied required little or no skills, or training or education and the workers by and large were men accustomed to the idea that their role was to obey orders. (O'Brien, 1998)

Taylor's approach inspired the father of the assembly line, Henry Ford when Ford and his executives tried new ways to reduce production costs. Managing these new factories required managing large flows of material, people, and information over large distances. (Wertheim, 1999) For example, the Ford Company created an assembly line method in which conveyor belts brought automobile parts to workers. Each worker was instructed how to efficiently perform a particular task, such as adding or tightening a part. This system helped reduce the assembly time of a Ford automobile from about 121/2 worker-hours in 1912 to about 11/2 worker-hours in 1914. (Sobel, 1999)

Taylor's influence can be seen today, even though the assembly line approach to worker behavior has faded from fashion, partly because of he increased efficiency and reliability of computers and mechanization in the means of production. Yet in terms of quality controls, managerial ideologies such as Jack Welch's Six Sigma, which aims to create a standard of near perfection for all company processes by eliminating production and supply chain inefficiencies, is a direct descendant of scientific management.

Although Frederic Winslow Taylor may have built his management model on observations of machines, for people working on machines, he also systematically analyzed human behavior at work. He stressed that just as machine parts were easily interchangeable, cheap, and passive, so too should the human parts be the same in the machine model of scientific organizations. In other words, even if one must lose an employee because of personal and cost concerns, the duties and protocols of the office should be sufficiently clear that another human being can fulfill those duties. (Wertheim, 1999) This is not a humane-sounding ideology, but the idea of functions rather than people is the key to the ability of any hierarchy to work in modern times, from the military to management of hierarchical corporations.