The Contributions by Frederick Taylor Were fundamental to the development of the industry in the early twentieth century. For this reason, this American engineer is considered as the father of the Scientific Administration and the first Industrial Engineer in history.
His most important work, The Principles of Scientific Administration , Was published in 1911 and despite the social and technological changes that have occurred since that time, many of its ideas remain in force or have been the basis for the development of new contributions. These are some of the most important.
Main contributions of Frederick Taylor
Taylor was the first to propose a scientific approach to work
His experience as an operator and workshop manager allowed him to discover that the workers were not as productive as they could and that diminished the company's performance.
That is why he proposed a scientific approach: to observe the way in which they worked to discover which were the most delayed actions and reorganize the activities in the most productive way.
For example, if a garment factory is operated by each operator in order to manufacture a garment from start to finish, the change of tasks and tools will be lost for a long time.
On the other hand, if you organize the activities so that an operator cuts all the garments and another one takes care of sewing them, it is possible to reduce the time of manufacture and to increase the profits of the company.
He raised the need to plan work
Today it seems very obvious that before undertaking a task we must plan what the steps will be to develop it. However, it was not always so.
Taylor was the first to estimate that in order to create any product in less time, it was necessary to plan the steps to be followed and the responsibilities of all the participants in that process.
Established the need to control the work to confirm that it was done correctly
Taylor noted that in industries it was common for managers to not know how their products were made and leave the whole process in the hands of employees.
Therefore, one of the principles of its scientific approach was that managers should observe and learn from all the processes of their company in order to plan and control them, making sure that they were being carried out in the most efficient way.
Introduced the idea of selecting staff
In these factories it was customary that all workers knew how to do everything and were not experts in anything concrete, which made many mistakes.
Taylor noted that all workers had different skills, so it was necessary to assign them a single activity that they could develop very well instead of many tasks they did poorly.
This practice is still maintained and is the raison d'être of Human Resources departments in companies.
Promoted the specialization of workers
As already mentioned, one of the principles of Taylor's scientific approach was to select employees according to their abilities to develop a particular activity.
This implied that both employees and managers will be trained in specific tasks to be attractive to companies, a practice that continues to this day.
It gave more prestige to the role of administrators
Before Taylor, the managers had no role in the development of the work and left all the responsibility in the hands of the operators.
It was thanks to ideas such as activity planning, job control, and staff selection that the core responsibilities that managers have to this day began to evolve.
Contributed to the growth and development of management faculties
At that time, business management was not known as a prestigious profession. However, with Taylor's scientific approach, this activity was given more seriousness and began to see itself as a respectable profession valued by industries.
Thanks to this phenomenon, administrative powers were multiplied in the United States and then throughout the world, and even a new discipline was created: industrial engineering.
He was the first to highlight the role of the worker
In Taylor's time, machines and factories were still a recent invention and were thought to be the protagonists of the work because they had succeeded in facilitating and streamlining production.
That is why it was a novelty that productivity also depended on employees and it was necessary to train them, evaluate them and motivate them to give their maximum at work.
This approach is not only maintained in force, but is the basis of disciplines such as organizational psychology and personnel management.
He wanted to reconcile the role of managers with that of workers
During his observations, Taylor noted that the workers were not motivated to give their maximum at work because, according to him, they did not feel that favored them.
So one of his ideas was that industries would provide incentives to those who were most productive to show that when companies succeeded, employees also received benefits.
His ideas went beyond the business field
After the publication of The Principles of Scientific Administration, Taylor's ideas began to be observed also from outside the industry.
Universities, social organizations, and even housewives began to analyze how principles such as planning, control, and specialization could be applied within their daily activities to achieve greater efficiency in them.
All the ideas of Taylor have been criticized and reformulated by experts in different disciplines throughout the more than one hundred years that have passed since his death.
It is criticized that the interest in the efficiency leaves of side the interest by the human being, that the excessive specialization hinders the search of employment and that not all the companies can be administered according to the same formulas.
However, his name remains critical because he was the first to ask key questions : How to make the companies more productive?, how to organize the work?, how to make the most of the talent of the employees?, or how to get them to work with motivation?
A series of questions that do not lose their importance over time, although the answers are different.
References
- Nelson, D. (1992). Scientific Management in retrospect. In: A mental revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. 249 pages. Retrieved from: hiostatepress.org.
- Nelson, D. (1992). Scientific Management and the Transformation of University Business Education. In: A mental revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. 249 pages. Retrieved from: ohiostatepress.org.
- Taylor, F. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper & Brothers publishers. Recovered from: saasoft.com.
- Turan, H. (2015). Taylor's"Scientific Management Principles": Contemporary Issues in Personnel Selection Period. Journal of Economics, Business and Management. 3 (11). Pp. 1102-1105. Recovered from: joebm.com.
- Uddin, N. (2015). Evolution of modern management through Taylorism: An adjustment of Scientific Management. In: Proceed Computer Science 62. Pages 578 - 584. Retrieved from: sciencedirect.com.
- Wren, D. (2011). The Centennial of Frederick W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management: A Retrospective Commentary. In: Journal of Business and Management. 17 (1). Page 11-22. Chapman.edu.