Frederick Winslow Taylor's
Principles of Scientific Management

Synopsis

Overview

Frederick Winslow Taylor developed the principles of Scientific Management as a way of replacing older, craft-based, manufacturing methods. In doing so, he revolutionised industrial production and his philosophy spread into all areas of industrial and business life which could be divided up into individual processes.


Before the advent of scientific management, the prevailing approach was to leave the solution of how to carry out a task more or less in the hands of each individual worker using his own preferred or prevailing methods. The shortcoming of this was that for each large scale manufacturing site the processes and tools to be used were not standardised with the consequence that it was very difficult, if not nigh on impossible, to increase the efficiency of production or reduce costs.


Taylor's scientific management on the other hand standardised tools for each task and also standarised the actions workers would need to performed. In this way work output across a site could be measured in a uniform way. This allowed refinement of processes so that there was efficient use of materials and labour. This revolutionised the practice of management in that the division of responsibility for completing the task was split into two - one part was the responsibility of management to plan the task and the other part was with the worker to execute it.


Scientific management also was used to set expectations as to what could be achieved. Taylor initially saw it as ways of winning over the trust of the workers. If the tasks were properly measured, planned and the workers taught how to use the new system then there would be no dispute about the right way to do a job. Taylor held out an incentive; he noted that if scientific management was correctly implemented then the move to efficient production would yield increasing benefits to workers (by way of an increased wage), the company (through higher profits) and the consumer (through lower prices). Taylor noted that if companies tried to increase profit without increasing workers wages then human nature would ensure that the gains would be unsustainable.


Taylor realised there was some limitations to the universality of scientific management. In testimony to a Congressional committee he agreed that scientific management would never be able to be applied to areas of work such as planning departments which did the management side of the preparation because scientific management was not inherently suited for application to work which could not be atomised and re-assembled into more efficient wholes.

Taylor, the man and milieu

Robert Kanigel in his biography of Taylor observed that in 1874 when Taylor began his apprenticeship, engine powered factories and mass manufacturing labour were a still a new idea. It was forty years before the Ford assembly line and by the standards of the average earner, goods of middle class life were expensive. The traditional way of learning engineering was on the job by way of an apprenticeship and on the coaching. Only seven schools offered degree programs in mechanical engineering and these had a combined total of thirty graduates. Taylor's apprenticeship in pattern making (for pouring castings) lasted for four years and he took on a second apprenticeship as a machinist in 1876. During this time he began his twenty six year effort to search for the laws which governed the more efficient cutting of metal and which ultimately lead to the development of scientific management.


Workers at that time were paid a piece-rate and the total amount they received in wages depended on the number of items they produced. It was the practice of management to cut the piece-rate if it was judged that the workers were receiving too much and in turn produced in the workers the feeling that a slower work rate was justified to ward off a rate cute. In the end this lead to a culture of everyone at a site working at that same rate.


Taylor assumed responsibility for work practices in the factory in which he employed and instead of just asking 'How long does a task take?' he was more curious about 'How long should a task take?'. The high speed cutting of steel was a complex problem with some dozen yet unknown variables. He also realised that if a better manufacturing methods were to adopted then the workers en mass would have to be convinced, since these new work practices were being developed though what was essentially trial and error. So Taylor, while having an appreciation that things could be done differently, was nevertheless bedeviled by not being able to provide proof which would overcome the skepticism and conservatism of workers. Management edict alone could not direct them in the right direction or motivate them against their better instincts, which were to preserve piece-rates. To this end Taylor then began his experiments into the cutting of steel at higher speeds which turned into a twenty six year effort to search for the laws which governed the more efficient cutting of metal and which also ultimately morphed into the philosophy of scientific management.

What is scientific management in practice?

In his 1911 paper, Taylor set out to prove that the foundation of the best management is a true science resting on clearly defined laws and principles which were applicable to all types of human activity.


He summarised the elements of scientific management as:

  • time study of tasks
  • use of numerous functional or specialised supervisors
  • the standarisation of all tools and elimination of unnecessary actions by workers
  • a planning department
  • use of the 'exception' principle in management
  • use of a slide rule for the quick and accurate calculation of settings
  • written instructions for the workers
  • division of work into measurable sub-tasks
  • a bonus pay or differential rate when targets were met
  • a system for classifying manufactured products
  • a routing system
  • a cost tracking system


So in scientific management, Taylor noted, management takes on themselves a number of duties:

  • development of a science
  • scientifically selecting and training workers
  • co-operating with the men
  • accepting responsibility for their part of what would be an equal division of work compared to the case beforehand where the workman bore the entire responsibility, both for the general plan as well as the detail of the work.

Commentary

We could observe that Taylor's theory of scientific management:

  • is simple in conception
  • has effectively reduced a complex situation to a set of simpler goals
  • relies on self evident motivation
  • scales well
  • is more difficult to implement when done well (and has been often done badly because to do it well requires time and motion studies to atomise the work so proper pre-planning and re-arrangement of the elements of the work can be done), and
  • requires a setting of an equitable quid pro quo for the other parties to this bargain (a form of social contract)

References

[1] Frederick Winslow Taylor,
     The Principles of Scientific Management
      http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6435, 1911
     [Note: lacks Taylor's end notes]


[2] Robert Kanigel,
     The One Best Way
     Penguin Books Limited, England, 1997
     ISBN 0-670-86402-1