Principles of management

A short note onAdministrative, scientific management

and bureaucracy.

Submitted by: Bibin Raphel (ME04b )

Gejoe Raghu Ram(ME04B086)

Rajgopal.M.A(ME04B123)

HENRI FAYOL

Henri FAYOL (1841-1925) is one of the French precursors of management. Its principles relating to the organization, the administration and

management were success in the United States. FAYOL “was reimported” in France after the second world war, by the American consultants, benefitting from the passion for the American model.

The merit of FAYOL was to release from its experiment of the simple principles, having to support efficiency in the companies thanks to the definition of the role of each one. Before him, the traditional functions production, provisioning, commercial, finances were already defined. It adds to it the “administrative” function on which it focuses its attention.

Whereas the “traditional” functions bring into play the matter and the machines, the administrative office acts only on the personnel. Made tact and of experiment, measurement is for FAYOL one of principal qualities of the administrator.

After having obtained large success in the reorganization and the expansion its business, it condenses its ideas of head of undertaking in industrial and general Administration, frequently republished work and which known success especially in the United States.Henri FAYOL

FAYOL underlines 3 other important tasks of the leader: to envisage, organize, coordinate.

The command ensures the good walk of the organization and the direction of the men holds an essential place to with it. It is an activity which rests at the same time on the personality of the leader and its knowledge of the administration of the company.

Control consists in checking the application of the action plan, the procedures and the orders. Inseparable from the sanctions, it is the subject itself of rigorous procedures.

The forecast must make it possible to prepare the future by establishing an at the same time flexible program to remain adaptable to the variations and sufficiently precis to be used as a basis commune, and to avoid any confusion, with the various actors. It is a task which calls upon the creativity as much as with calculation.

The organization consists in providing the company with the bodies necessary to its operation, to define their functions, their responsibilities, to establish procedures.

Coordination aims to connect, link and harmonize the efforts of all, mainly through weekly conferences. Certain frameworks of direction are invited to take part in it.

According to FAYOL all these tasks are present in all the activities of the company, but according to the station, their respective importance varies;

For a workman, the technical activity represents 85 % of the total and the activities of safety, accountancy and administrative divide the remainder. For a director general, the administrative activities cover 50 % with its time, each of the others by representing 10 %. Since these activities can be analyzed for each station in the company, it becomes also possible to organize the training of the men consequently in order to optimize their performances.

So that the administrative office is correctly filled, Fayol (1916) estimates that it must be based on principles, expression which corresponds for him to an idea of flexibility.

14 principles for a good management

1. The division of the labour.

The purpose of it is to manage to better produce more and with the same effort. It makes it possible to reduce the number of objects on which the attention and the effort must go. It does not apply only to the technical works but to all work which brings into play a more or less great number of people. It has as a consequence the specialization of the functions. But it has its limits that the experiment, accompanied by the spirit of measurement, learns how not to cross.

Always true essentially, with two innovations however: * the too pushed segmentation of the repetitive tasks removes any interest with work. There is an opposite tendency, which preaches with the job enrichment. * current management encourages in certain fields the appearance of transverse functions, for which the concept of hierarchy grows blurred with the profit of the operational role.

2. Authority.

“It is the right to order and the capacity to be made obey”

To make a good chief, the personal authority (made intelligence, of knowing, experiment, moral value, gift of command) is the essential complement of the statutory authority, allotted by the function. It is inseparable from its counterpart which is the responsibility, including the sanction.

At the time of Fayol, the statutory hierarchy went from oneself, nowadays the things are not more inevitably thus; the hierarchical roles often yield the place to roles of animation. Nevertheless, personal authority (charisma?) remain well done quoted qualities.

3. The discipline.

“The public spirit is deeply convinced that the discipline is absolutely necessary to the good walk of the businesses and that no company could thrive without discipline.”

“It is primarily obedience, assiduity, the activity, the behaviour, the signs external of respect carried out in accordance with the conventions established between the company and its agents”

The concept of discipline to the daily newspaper does not seem also any more rigid, though the drafting of the rules of procedure is always inspired by this principle.

And Fayol to add: “When a defect of discipline appears or when the agreement between chiefs and subordinates leaves something to be desired, one should not be restricted négligemment to reject for it the responsibility on the bad condition for the troop; most of the time, the evil results from the incapacity of the chiefs.”

4. Unit of command.

For an unspecified action, “an agent should receive orders only of one chief.” Any failure with this principle led according to FAYOL, a deterioration of the organization.

It is obvious that there is nothing easier than to return two authorities back to back and to exploit the situation if there is not unit of command. Personally I force myself with always passing by the intermediate hierarchy and directly not giving orders to the executants. If the urgency or the circumstances orders differently, it is absolutely necessary to quickly inform the intermediate hierarchy of the instructions given.

5. The unit of direction

“Only one chief and only one program for a whole of operations aiming at the same goal.”

Supplemented by this maxim: to give to everyone, it is to give to anybody. For a better efficiency and to avoid against-productive internal competitions, this principle has the even force of law!

6. Subordination of the interest particular to the interest general.

Which one must be very attentive because all kinds of causes tend to attenuate it; ignorance, ambitions, selfishness, idleness, weaknesses all, in short, human passions tend to make lose sight of the fact the interest general by privileging the private individual.

In complement of reading, semi-serious, semi-mild nutter, I recommend “antimanagement, of resourcefulness to the theory L” of Jean-Paul Sallenave, Editions of organization, 1993, where the author initially develops a whole theory based on “me!”

7. Remuneration of the personnel.

It is the price of the rendered service.It “must be equitable and, as much as possible, give satisfaction at the same time to the personnel and to the company, the employer and the employee”

Topic eternal and probably impossible consensus…

8. Centralization

“The question of centralization or decentralization is a simple question of measurement. It is a question of finding the limit favorable to the company… The goal to continue is the best possible use of faculties of all the personnel. ” Replace “decentralization” by “delegation” and read again

9. The hierarchy

“The series of the chiefs which goes from the authority higher than the lower agents”. The command makes of it the transportation route necessary however it is necessary to take care to avoid a too long transmission.

With the tendency to the flatness of the hierarchical pyramids and the reduction of the hierarchical stations, this line of naturally shortened transmission. Technology also shorts-circuit all the traditional channels, in the case of the networks, of the Intranets…

10. The order

It at the same time material, is expressed by the maxim “a place for each thing and each thing in its place” and social with this adaptation; a place for each person and each person in her place.The order depends on two conditions: a good organization and a good recruitment. While forgetting this simple rule of good direction, one comes to situations difficult to restore owing to the fact that a certain threshold of disorder was crossed.

11. Equity

Justice is appreciated according to laid down rules, whereas equity goes further; it is made interpretations necessary of these rules, inevitably incomplete. “it asks, in the application, much of good direction, much of experiment and much of kindness”

It is probably in this principle that shows through with most obviously the tendency to the paternalism of its author.

12. The stability of the personnel

It conditions the effectiveness of a formation which is generally long: “one needs much time, indeed, to make knowledge with the men and the things of a large company, to be able to decide an action plan, to take self-confidence and to inspire confidence with the others.

As it was often noted as a chief of average capacity which lasts is infinitely preferable with chiefs of high capacity who do nothing but pass.”

This principle appears enigmatic to me; why limit it to the “chiefs”? Did the rotation of the personnel more touch this category in its time? Or was the sensitivity to rotation of the other categories lower than nowadays?

In addition, does stability include the limitation of promotions? I see there a complement with the principle of order. Your opinion is welcome; email

13. The initiativeIt is freedom to propose and carry out. It contributes to the development of a dynamics bus “on all the levels of the social scale, the zeal and the activity of the agents is increased by the initiative. The initiative of all, coming to be added to that of the chief and, if need be, to compensate it, is a great force for the companies.”

Extraordinarily of topicality; participative management, job enrichment, system of suggestion… The humility of Fayol made him recognize the potentials of all the employees, same modest.

14. Union of the personnel

If it is advisable to divide the forces of the adversary to secure the victory, it is necessary for supporting the union of the personnel, the harmony of the relations. For Fayol, the abuse written communication would be a source of conflicts (and costs) and it is thus necessary to limit the use of it.

Written in a quasi military style, it lets show through the other models probable of the author. Benevolent paternalism temperate person the military edge.

Bureaucracy

Origin of the conceptBureaucracy is derived from the word bureau, used from the early in 18th century Western Europe not just to refer to a writing desk, but to an office, i.e. a workplace, where officials worked. The original French meaning of the word bureau was the baize used to cover desks. The term bureaucracy came into use shortly before the French revolution of 1789, and from there rapidly spread to other countries. The Greek suffix -kratia or kratos - means "power" or "rule". Bureaucracy thus basically means office power or office rule, the rule of the officialdom.In a letter of July 1, 1764, the French Baron De Grimm declared: "We are obsessed by the idea of regulation, and our Masters of Requests refuse to understand that there is an infinity of things in a great state with which a government should not concern itself." Jean Claude Marie Vincent de Gournay sometimes used to say, "We have an illness in France which bids fair to play havoc with us; this illness is called bureaumania." Sometimes he used to invent a fourth or fifth form of government under the heading of "bureaucracy". In another letter of July 15, 1765 Baron Grimm wrote also, "The real spirit of the laws in France is that bureaucracy of which the late Monsieur de Gournay used to complain so greatly; here the offices, clerks, secretaries, inspectors and intendants are not appointed to benefit the public interest, indeed the public interest appears to have been established so that offices might exist." (Baron de Grimm and Diderot, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 1753-69, 1813 edition, Vol. 4, p. 146 & 508 - cited by Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy. London: Pall Mall Press, 1970, p. 16).This quote refers to a traditional controversy about bureaucracy, namely the perversion of means and ends so that means become ends in themselves, and the greater good is lost sight of; as a corollary, the substitution of sectional interests for the general interest. The suggestion here is that, left uncontrolled, the bureaucracy will become increasingly self-serving and corrupt, rather than serving society.However, bureaucracy existed long before words and theories were devised to describe it in detail.

The Chinese Song dynasty (960 AD) for example constructed a centralized bureaucracy staffed with civilian scholar-officials. This system of rule led to a much greater concentration of power in the hands of the emperor and his palace bureaucracy than was achieved in previous dynasties.

Karl Marx and bureaucracy

Thus, the earliest bureaucracies consisted of castes of religious clergy, officials and scribes operating various rituals, and armed functionaries specifically delegated to keep order. In the historical transition from primitive egalitarian communities to a civil society divided into social classes and estates, occurring from about 10,000 years ago, authority is increasingly centralised in, and enforced by a state apparatus existing separately from society. This state formulates, imposes and enforces laws, and levies taxes, giving rise to an officialdom enacting these functions. Thus, the state mediates in conflicts among the people and keeps those conflicts within acceptable bounds; it also organises the defence of territory. Most importantly, the right of ordinary people to carry and use weapons of force becomes increasingly restricted; forcing other people to do things becomes increasingly the legal right of the state authorities only. But the growth of trade and commerce adds a new, distinctive dimension to bureaucracy, insofar as it requires the keeping of accounts and the processing/recording of transactions, as well as the enforcement of legal rules governing trade. If resources are increasingly distributed by prices in markets, this requires extensive and complex systems of record-keeping, management and calculation, conforming to legal standards. Eventually, this means that the total amount of work involved in commercial administration outgrows the total amount of work involved in government administration. In modern capitalist society, private sector bureaucracy is larger than government bureaucracy, if measured by the number of administrative workers in the division of labour as a whole. Some corporations nowadays have a turnover larger than the national income of whole countries, with large administrations supervising operations.A fourth source of bureaucracy inheres in the technologies of mass production, which require many standardised routines and procedures to be performed. Even if mechanisation replaces people with machinery, people are still necessary to design, control, supervise and operate the machinery.

The technologies chosen may not be the ones that are best for everybody, but which create incomes for a particular class of people or maintain their power. This type of bureaucracy is nowadays often called a technocracy, which owes its power to control over specialised technical knowledge.In Marx's theory, bureaucracy rarely creates new wealth by itself, but rather controls, co-ordinates and governs the production, distribution and consumption of wealth. The bureaucracy as a social stratum derives its income from the appropriation of part of the social surplus product of human labor. Wealth is appropriated by the bureaucracy by law through fees, taxes, levies, tributes, licensing etc.Bureaucracy is therefore always a cost to society, but this cost may be accepted insofar as it makes social order possible, and maintains it. Nevertheless there are constant conflicts about this cost, because it has the big effect on the distribution of incomes; all producers will try to get the maximum return from what they produce, and minimise administrative costs. Typically, in epochs of strong economic growth, bureaucracies proliferate; when economic growth declines, a fight breaks out to cut back bureaucratic costs.Whether or not a bureaucracy as a social stratum can become a genuine ruling class depends greatly on the prevailing property relations and the mode of production of wealth. In capitalist society, the state typically lacks an independent economic base, finances many activities on credit, and is heavily dependent on levying taxes as a source of income. Therefore, its power is limited by the costs which private owners of the productive assets will tolerate. If, however, the state owns the means of production itself, the state bureaucracy can become much more powerful, and act as a ruling class or power elite. Because in that case, it directly controls the sources of new wealth, and manages or distributes the social product. This is the subject of Marxist theories of bureaucratic collectivism.Marx himself however never theorised this possibility in detail, and it has been the subject of much controversy among Marxists. The core organisational issue in these disputes concerns the degree to which the administrative allocation of resources by government authorities and the market allocation of resources can achieve the social goal of creating a more free, just and prosperous society. Which decisions should be made by whom, at what level, so that an optimal allocation of resources results? This is just as much a moral-political issue as an economic issue.

Central to the Marxian concept of socialism is the idea of workers' self-management, which assumes the internalisation of a morality and self-discipline among people that would make bureaucratic supervision and control redundant, together with a drastic reorganisation of the division of labour in society. Bureaucracies emerge to mediate conflicts of interest on the basis of laws, but if those conflicts of interest disappear, bureaucracies would also be redundant.Marx's critics are however skeptical of the feasibility of this kind of socialism, given the continuing need for administration, and the propensity of people to put their own self-interest before the communal interest. That is, the argument is that self-interest and the communal interest might never coincide, or, at any rate, can always diverge significantly.[edit]

Max Weber on bureaucracy

Max Weber has probably been one of the most influential users of the word in its social science sense. He is well-known for his study of bureaucratization of society; many aspects of modern public administration go back to him; a classic, hierarchically organized civil service of the continental type is—if basically mistakenly—called "Weberian civil service".However, contrary to popular belief, "bureaucracy" was an English word before Weber; the Oxford English Dictionary cites usage in several different years between 1818 and 1860, prior to Weber's birth in 1864.Weber described the ideal type bureaucracy in positive terms, considering it to be a more rational and efficient form of organization than the alternatives that preceded it, which he characterized as charismatic domination and traditional domination. According to his terminology, bureaucracy is part of legal domination. However, he also emphasized that bureaucracy becomes inefficient when a decision must be adopted to an individual case.According to Weber, the attributes of modern bureaucracy include its impersonality, concentration of the means of administration, a leveling effect on social and economic differences and implementation of a system of authority that is practically indestructible.

Weber's analysis of bureaucracy concerns:

the historical and administrative reasons for the process of bureaucratization (especially in the Western civilisation)

the impact of the rule of law upon the functioning of bureaucratic organisations

the typical personal orientation and occupational position of a bureaucratic officials as a status group

the most important attributes and consequences of bureaucracy in the modern world

A bureaucratic organization is governed by the following seven principles:official business is conducted on a continuous basisofficial business is conducted with strict accordance to the following

rules: the duty of each official to do certain types of work is delimited in

terms of impersonal criteriathe official is given the authority necessary to carry out his

assigned functionsthe means of coercion at his disposal are strictly limited and

conditions of their use strictly definedevery official's responsibilities and authority are part of a vertical

hierarchy of authority, with respective rights of supervision and appeal

officials do not own the resources necessary for the performance of their assigned functions but are accountable for their use of these resources

official and private business and income are strictly separatedoffices cannot be appropriated by their incumbents (inherited, sold, etc.)official business is conducted on the basis of written documents

A bureaucratic official: is personally free and appointed to his position on the basis of conduct exercises the authority delegated to him in accordance with

impersonal rules, and his loyalty is enlisted on behalf of the faithful execution of his official duties

appointment and job placement are dependent upon his technical qualifications

administrative work is a full-time occupation work is rewarded by a regular salary and prospects of advancement in

a lifetime career An official must exercise his judgment and his skills, but his duty is to place these at the service of a higher authority; ultimately he is responsible only for the impartial execution of assigned tasks and must sacrifice his personal judgment if it runs counter to his official duties.Weber's work has been continued by many, like Robert Michels with his Iron Law of Oligarchy.

Criticism

As Max Weber himself noted, in reality no ideal type organisation can exist. Thus the real bureaucracy will be less optimal and effective than his ideal model. Each of Weber's seven principles can degenerate:

Vertical hierarchy of authority can became chaotic, some offices can be omitted in the decision making process, there may be conflicts of competence;

Competences can be unclear and used contrary to the spirit of the law; sometimes a decision itself may be considered more important than its effect;

Nepotism , corruption, political infighting and other degenerations can counter the rule of impersonality and can create a recrutation and promotion system not based on meritocracy but rather on oligarchy;

Officials can try to avoid responsibility and seek anonymity by avoiding documentation of their procedures (or creating extreme amounts of chaotic, confusing documents)

Even a non-degenerated bureaucracy can be affected by common problems: Overspecialisation, making individual officials not aware of larger

consequences of their actions Rigidity and inertia of procedures, making decision-making slow or

even impossible when facing some unusual case, and similarly delaying change, evolution and adaptation of old procedures to new circumstances;

A phenomenon of group thinking - zealotry, loyalty and lack of critical thinking regarding the organisation which is perfect and always correct by definition, making the organisation unable to change and realise its own mistakes and limitations;

Disregard for dissenting opinions, even when such views suit the available data better than the opinion of the majority;

A phenomenon of Catch-22 (named after a famous book by Joseph Heller) - as bureaucracy creates more and more rules and procedures, their complexity raises and coordination diminishes, facilitating creation of contradictory rules

In the most extreme examples bureaucracy can lead to the treatment of individual human beings as impersonal objects. This process has been criticised by many philosophers and writers (Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Hannah Arendt) and satirized in the comic strip Dilbert.

COMPARISON

Fayol and Taylor

It is frequently made parallels between Taylor and Fayol and, in fact, Henri Fayol contribute in the administrative domain a share completely comparable with that which Taylor proposes for the activity of production.

* Taylor is interested in the productive universe, it has a “microscopic” sight of it, it wants all to quantify and to codify with a rational and scientific step, it seeks the “one best way”, he is deterministic.

* Fayol has a “macroscopic” vision, it takes retreat and observes the company as a whole. Pragmatic, it recommends the flexibility, measurement, the permanent adaptability.

* Fayol recognizes the contribution of intrinsic qualities of the individual to his task, whereas Taylor tries to make work independent of any know-how or particular aptitude.

* Fayol frequently privileges the experiment and especially measurement. It is one of the aspects characteristic of its “modernity” bus although it fits in the current general of the specialists in the scientific management of the companies, unlike Taylor, its approach is conceivable only in a flexible way, pragmatic.

The ideas of Fayol are so much “current” that by preparing this text, I have to check several times that it was quite contemporary of Taylor.Fayol today

# It recognized human resources like such, before the theorists such as Mayo révèleront it later twenty years. At this beginning of millenium, where the human stock management is more topicality than ever, the principles of Fayol keep all their freshness.

# The measurement recommended by Fayol is a key of management always usable; it keeps the adaptability of the decision maker, the flexibility of the organization. No dogmatism, not of sclerosing rigidity, but the conservation of a capacity of judgement and adaptation to the circumstances.However, in our increasingly unstable context, this quality is fundamental, can be determining for the survival of the company.

# Lastly, in “management”, Michel Weill puts this question in connection with the teaching of sciences of management:

“Perhaps is advisable it to observe that with one century of shift, accomplished progress remains limited and the schools of engineers, like faculties of sciences and technology maintain a careful reserve with regard to fields towards which an always high number of their graduates will however move a day or the other.”

Scientific management theory

In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his work, The Principles of Scientific Management, in which he described how the application of the scientific method to the management of workers greatly could improve productivity. Scientific management methods called for optimizing the way that tasks were performed and simplifying the jobs enough so that workers could be trained to perform their specialized sequence of motions in the one "best" way.

Prior to scientific management, work was performed by skilled craftsmen who had learned their jobs in lengthy apprenticeships. They made their own decisions about how their job was to be performed. Scientific management took away much of this autonomy and converted skilled crafts into a series of simplified jobs that could be performed by unskilled workers who easily could be trained for the tasks.

The principal object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee. The words "maximum prosperity" are used, in their broad sense, to mean not only large dividends for the company or owner, but the development of every branch of the business to its highest state of excellence, so that the prosperity may be permanent.

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.

Taylor became interested in improving worker productivity early in his career when he observed gross inefficiencies during his contact with steel workers.

Taylor's 4 Principles of Scientific Management

After years of various experiments to determine optimal work methods, Taylor proposed the following four principles of scientific management:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

These principles were implemented in many factories, often increasing productivity by a factor of three or more. Henry Ford applied Taylor's principles in his automobile factories, and families even began to perform their household tasks based on the results of time and motion studies.

Mass production methods

Taylorism is often mentioned along with Fordism, because it was closely associated with mass production methods in manufacturing factories. Taylor's own name for his approach was scientific management. This sort of task-oriented optimization of work tasks is nearly ubiquitous today in menial industries, most notably in assembly lines and fast-food restaurants. His arguments began from his observation that, in general, workers in repetitive jobs work at the slowest rate that goes unpunished. This slow rate of work (which he called "soldiering", but might nowadays be termed "loafing" or "malingering" as a typical part of a day's work), he opined, was a combination of the inherent laziness of people and the observation that,

when paid the same amount, workers will tend to do the amount of work the slowest among them does.

He therefore proposed that the work practice that had been developed in most work environments was crafted, intentionally or unintentionally, to be very inefficient in its execution. From this he posited that there was one best method for performing a particular task, and that if it were taught to workers, their productivity would go up.

Taylor introduced many concepts that were not widely accepted at the time. For example, by observing workers, he decided that labor should include rest breaks so that the worker has time to recover from fatigue. He proved this with the task of unloading ore. Workers were taught to take rest during work and output went up. Today's armies use it during forced marches - the soldiers are ordered to take a break of 10 minutes for every hour of marching. This allows for a much longer forced march than continuous walking.

Division of labour

Taylor recognized that there is a certain suitability of certain people for particular jobs:

Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work.

This view -- match the worker to the job -- has resurfaced time and time again in management theories.

Soldiering

Working in the steel industry, Taylor had observed the phenomenon of workers' purposely operating well below their capacity, that is, soldiering. He attributed soldiering to three causes:

1. The almost universally held belief among workers that if they became more productive, fewer of them would be needed and jobs would be eliminated.

2. Non-incentive wage systems encourage low productivity if the employee will receive the same pay regardless of how much is produced, assuming the employee can convince the employer that the slow pace really is a good pace for the job. Employees take great care never to work at a good pace for fear that this faster pace would become the new standard. If employees are paid by the quantity they produce, they fear that management will decrease their per-unit pay if the quantity increases.

3. Workers waste much of their effort by relying on rule-of-thumb methods rather than on optimal work methods that can be determined by scientific study of the task.

To counter soldiering and to improve efficiency, Taylor began to conduct experiments to determine the best level of performance for certain jobs, and what was necessary to achieve this performance.

Time Studies

Taylor argued that even the most basic, mindless tasks could be planned in a way that dramatically would increase productivity, and that scientific management of the work was more effective than the "initiative and incentive" method of motivating workers. The initiative and incentive

method offered an incentive to increase productivity but placed the responsibility on the worker to figure out how to do it.

To scientifically determine the optimal way to perform a job, Taylor performed experiments that he called time studies, (also known as time and motion studies). These studies were characterized by the use of a stopwatch to time a worker's sequence of motions, with the goal of determining the one best way to perform a job.

The following are examples of some of the time-and-motion studies that were performed by Taylor and others in the era of scientific management.

Pig IronIf workers were moving 12 1/2 tons of pig iron per day and they could be incentivized to try to move 47 1/2 tons per day, left to their own wits they probably would become exhausted after a few hours and fail to reach their goal. However, by first conducting experiments to determine the amount of resting that was necessary, the worker's manager could determine the optimal timing of lifting and resting so that the worker could move the 47 1/2 tons per day without tiring.

Not all workers were physically capable of moving 47 1/2 tons per day; perhaps only 1/8 of the pig iron handlers were capable of doing so. While these 1/8 were not extraordinary people who were highly prized by society, their physical capabilities were well-suited to moving pig iron. This example suggests that workers should be selected according to how well they are suited for a particular job.

The Science of ShovelingIn another study of the "science of shoveling", Taylor ran time studies to determine that the optimal weight that a worker should lift in a shovel was 21 pounds. Since there is a wide range of densities of materials, the shovel should be sized so that it would hold 21 pounds of the substance being shoveled. The firm provided the workers with optimal shovels. The result was a three to four fold increase in productivity and workers were rewarded with pay increases. Prior to scientific management, workers used their own shovels and rarely had the optimal one for the job.

BricklayingOthers performed experiments that focused on specific motions, such as Gilbreth's bricklaying experiments that resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of motions required to lay bricks. The husband and wife Gilbreth team used motion picture technology to study the motions of the workers in some of their experiments.

Failings

While his principles have a certain logic, most applications of it fails to account for two inherent difficulties:

It ignores individual differences: the most efficient way of working for one person may be inefficient for another;

It ignores the fact that the economic interests of workers and management are rarely identical, so that both the measurement processes and the retraining required by Taylor's methods would frequently be resented and sometimes sabotaged by the workforce.

Ironically, both difficulties were recognized by Taylor, but are generally not fully addressed by managers who only see the potential improvements to efficiency. Taylor believed that scientific management can not work unless the worker benefits. In his view management should arrange the work in such a way that one is able to produce more and get paid more, by teaching and implementing more efficient procedures for producing a product.

In general, pure Taylorism views workers simply as machines, to be made efficient by removing unnecessary or wasted effort. However, some would say that this approach ignores the complications introduced because workers are necessarily human: personal needs, interpersonal difficulties, and the very real difficulties introduced by making jobs so efficient that workers have no time to relax. As a result, workers worked harder, but became dissatisfied with the work environment. Some have argued that this discounting of worker personalities led to the rise of labor unions.It can also be said that the rise in labor unions is leading to a push on the part of industry to accelerate the process of automation, a process that is undergoing

a renaissance with the invention of a host of new technologies starting with the computer and the Internet.

However, tactfully choosing to ignore the still controversial process of automating human work is also politically expedient, so many still say that practical problems caused by Taylorism led to its replacement by the human relations school of management in 1930.

However, Taylor's theories were clearly at the root of a global revival in theories of scientific management in the latter two decades of the 20th century, under the moniker of 'corporate reengineering'. So, as such, Taylor's ideas can be seen as the root of a very influential series of developments in the workplace, with the goal being the eventual elimination of industry's need for unskilled, and later perhaps, even most skilled labor in any form, directly following Taylor's recipe for deconstructing a process. This has come to be known as commoditization, and no skilled profession, even medicine, has proven to be immune from the efforts of Taylors followers, the 'reengineers' - who are often called derogatory names such as 'bean counters'

.Drawbacks of Scientific Management

While scientific management principles improved productivity and had a substantial impact on industry, they also increased the monotony of work. The core job dimensions of skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback all were missing from the picture of scientific management.

While in many cases the new ways of working were accepted by the workers, in some cases they were not. The use of stopwatches often was a protested issue and led to a strike at one factory where "Taylorism" was being tested. Complaints that Taylorism was dehumanizing led to an investigation by the United States Congress. Despite its controversy, scientific management changed the way that work was done, and forms of it continue to be used today.