Dynamics Facing the Managers of Today Are Different from Those Facing the Managers of Taylor's Time

Scientific management is one best way for a job to be done and to improve worker efficiency (Robbins, 1994, p.32). Frederick Winslow Taylor was known to have applied the scientific management because he was very concern about time, there are 2 other people that helped Taylor a lot of formalizing scientific management, they were: Frank & Lillian Gilbreth and Henry Gantt.

1.0 Frederick Winslow Taylor

1.1 Start of Scientific Management

F.W. Taylor began scientific management during the second industry revolution that started in 1850, which were the development of ships and railways that had the power from steam and also the development of electrical power generation. Taylor was born in 1856, he worked his way up from a labourer to a chief engineer for over 6 years (Bartol, Margaret, Graham, and Martin, 2005, p.34), he then he saw managers were struggled to control workers to work more efficient and they purposely work below capacity that could increase productivity, which is called soldiering. There are 3 causes to soldiering, they are:

1) They thought if they became more productive, fewer of them would be needed and jobs would be removed.

2) The wage system did not motivate the workers to work harder because they receive the same pay, regardless of how much is produced. Hence, employees fears that management will decrease the pay if they set a new standard of a faster pace, which lead to increase in quantity.

3) Workers wasted much of their effort by relying on rule-of-thumb methods (Bartol et al, 2005, p.35).

1.2 The Principles

To counter soldiering and improve the labour efficiency, he made four principles of scientific management: Firstly Scientifically study each part of a task and develop the best method for performing it; next principle is to select, train and develop workers instead of allowing them to choose their own tasks and train themselves as best they could; the third one is the development between workers and management to ensure that work would be carried out in agreement with the proper method; the last principle is the division of work between workers and the management in almost equal shares, each group taking over the work for which it is best fitted instead of the responsibility mainly put on the workers (Robbins,1994, p.32).

1.3 Time and Motion Studies

Taylor found time and motion studies to learn the workers movements on the job, he made the workers to take out useless movements, deciding the best way to do the job, he then timed each movement to find the expected daily production level (Bartol et al, 2005, p.35). To accomplish these studies, he had to do some experiments. One of them is shovelling, Taylor ran time studies to determine that the best weight that a worker should lift in a shovel was 9.5 kilograms. He disagreed that the shovel should have different sizes so that it would hold 9.5 kilograms of the iron ore and ashes being shovelled. The firm provided the workers with optimal shovels. The result grew from 16.3 to 60.2 per day for each worker and workers were rewarded with pay increases from $1.15 to $1.88, and the average cost of handling dropped from $0.072 to $0.033 per tonne (Bartol et al, 2005, p.35).

Based on these motion studies, scientific management believed to help to develop workers skills and abilities to reach their maximum potential. Taylor's view of the motivations of workers has had a thoughtful influence throughout the century until the present day.

1.4 Effects

His belief that man was rational and would make economic choices, which means that workers will put a lot of effort on the job if they get a highly reasonable wages. Although scientific management believed to help to develop workers skills and abilities to reach their maximum potential, but so many people criticised of how it treats human beings like machines and assumes that workers are satisfied by money alone and the workers got bored because they had to do the same work over and over again, there was not any motivation to make workers enjoy their works. F.W.Taylor passed away in 1915, his death did not stop other companies to use scientific management, and it even grew. Recently in Australia, a mechanical sheep shearing called ShearExpress is the only company that still applied scientific management and it has been successful.

2.0 Today’s Management

There have been changes and improvements in the science of management since the era of Taylor, because of certain factors, although there