The theories of Frederick W. Taylor’s Scientific Management proposed in Edwin A. Locke’s (1982) “The Ideas of Frederick W. Taylor An evaluation” point to Taylor’s tremendous influence on modern-day management. Because Taylor developed this principle in the early 1900’s focusing mainly on scientific decision-making and individualized work while working with manufacturing industry, it poses questions on it’s validity in the modern-day management and how effective his techniques in employer-employee relationship. this posed a lot of Locke indicates that Taylor’s Scientific Management theory led to the beginning of modern management principles and methods that are still being used by many managers around the world (Robbins, Bergman, Stagg & Coulter, 2012).
There are 2 key elements of his theory - that is scientific Decision-making and management-labor cooperation. Locke (1982) provided a summary of these concepts wherein he agreed that most of Taylor’s philosophies and techniques in these 2 aspects are widely embraced in the management industry.
1. Scientific Decision-Making
a. Time and Motion Study
i. Taylor arrived at this technique facing challenges on efficiency in the manufacturing industries with the goal to increase profits (Kulesza et al., 2011).
b. Standardization
i. This focused on creating standard tools and procedures
c. Goal-setting
i. Originally called the task and believed to be the model used for development of Management by Objectives (MBO) technique by Pierre Dupont and the term Organizational Behavior modification (OB Mod)
d. Money as a motivator
i. Taylor believes that workers are motivated with the reward of money.
e. Management’s responsibility for training
i. Is a technique that advocates management experts are responsible for training of workers.
f. Scientific selection
i. To achieve
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