How Relevant Are the Ideas of Taylorism in Todays Work Places - Example

Running Title: How relevant are the ideas of taylorism to today’s workplaces Student’s Name: Instructors Name: Course Code and Name: Institution: Date Assignment is due: How Relevant are the ideas of Taylorism in today’s work places Taylorism is a management idea and methodology that has been developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor. The proper name for it is scientific management. This management theory analyzes and synthesizes workflows. Its main objective is to improve work efficiency. It is concerned with labour productivity. Taylor first came up with his ideas or theoretical constructs in the late1800s (1883) and early1900s (up to1913).The theories he developed on job design and employee motivation are what came to be referred to as scientific management. He first referred to his ideas as shop management. The theory that bears his name was developed while he was working at Midvale Steel Company. This is in Pennsylvania (Baldry, Peter & Taylor, 1998). Taylorism is governed by five main principles. These are the guidelines that mark the direction taken by scientific management. The first principle is that jobs are fragmented to the maximum. They are fragmented to the last bit, from which further fragmentation is impossible. Jobs are dissected and separated to separate tasks. The second principle is in planning and doing. The third principle is the separation of direct and indirect labour. Labour is separated into two groups, direct and indirect. The fourth principle deals with skills. Skill requirements and the job learning time are reduced. They are minimized. The fifth principle calls for the minimization of material handling (Baldry, Peter &Taylor, 1998). The first principle of scientific management as outlined above calls for the fragmentation of tasks to the maximum. It is the central principle in scientific management. It is what defines Taylorism in the work place. According to this principle, Tasks should be subjected to systematic measurement, tabulation, observation and analysis. This is in order to adhere to scientific laws of work. This principle stipulates that the scientific laws should dictate the specific element of tasks performed. This is to say that these laws should formulate the separate and smaller tasks of work. The laws should also set out the time required to accomplish the given tasks and speed the tasks to be adopted in the accomplishment of the tasks. Furthermore, the laws should also set out the methodology to be adopted in performing the tasks. The modes of payment and the frequency of payment should also be worked out using these laws. The use and implementation of machines in the work place should be set out using these scientific laws (Hughes, 2004). The first principle is relevant to some contemporary work places. In automobile assembly lines, this principle is quite relevant today. This is because the work is detailed, and requires concentration. This is what happens in car assembly lines all over the world. The Japanese, in their many car production outfits, employ this principle. Companies like Toyota have been using this principle of scientific management for long. They have successfully employed this idea of scientific management to become the top carmakers in the world. The Japanese are not the first to utilize this principle in production. The application of this scientific management idea to the work place can be traced to Henry Ford, and the mass production of vehicles. This was from the beginning of 1906. Since then, the idea has been in use wherever there is mass production of products that follow line assembling (Kanigel, 1997). In the work place, the ideas or the principle of fragmentation of work is applicable to the retail industry. This is because the separate tasks in the retail industry are detailed, and differentiated. Thus, fragmentation is the only way that works for this industry (Zuboff, 1988).One of the retail outfits that has utilized this principle is MacDonalds.These fast food restaurants have to fragment work to the most minimum task. This is because it is the only way to survive. Workers cannot afford to multitask. This is because these restaurants are remarkably busy. The first principle of Taylorism works for this fast food chain. It is important to note that, in many other aspects, the principle of fragmentation is not applicable. This is in fields like management. This is because management calls for multitasking. A high ranking manager should be a generalist; he or she should be able to fit in a variety of tasks. The manager should not have specialized skills that put him or her into a particular niche. For the manager, job fragmentation is not possible (Head, 2005). The separation of planning and doing is the second principle. The principle involves the taking of power away from the manual workers. This means that managers and supervisors decide what is to be done and by whom. Under Taylorism, job design neglects the concept team spirit and partnership. This system favours strong hierarchical structure. This is from the president to management to manual workers (Karasek, 1990). Manual workers do not have the power of planning. Decision making power rests with the management. This has the effect of leaving the company segmented. There are schisms in the company. This system of management creates a feeling of us versus them in the company (Head, 2005). The separation of planning and doing can not thrive in today’s business world. For example, in call centre companies it would create havoc and ruin the company. A call centre company like Touchdown Offices Ltd has both manual labourers and managers. If all the decisions are to be taken by the managers, this would be impossible. This is because the said company offers telephone answering services to businesses. The manual workers have to decide what to tell various customers. They have to make decisions. If they do not make decisions the company can collapse. Most companies have not been weaned from this tendency which the paper believes is destructive for companies. The principle can be seen in many companies today. This is because a lot of decisions are left to the top management in a company. Many companies have adopted team work in the workplace. This is because they have found out that leaving the decisions to the top leadership is detrimental to most businesses in the current world. Some departments in companies work out their tasks without the involvement of the top leadership. Marketing departments have taken the lead (Karasek, 1990). Today they can rebrand a package. They can also create new brands without the interference of top leadership. This is been seen in companies like General electric In New York in the US. Most create new adverts and only take them to the top managers for final approval (Sorensen, Charles & Samuel, 1956). Most companies have realized that the way forward is by involving every worker in the decision making process. The principle of leaving decision making to the management has become obsolete. The second principle of Taylorism cannot be applicable in today’s economy. It has become outdated. The only place where it seems to work is in the military, and in other government outfits. Organizations today have adopted the relational approach to management. This is in contrast to the organizational approaches that call to practice the principles of Taylorism (Gershon, 2001). The third principle offers the premise that direct labour should not perform preparatory and servicing jobs. In other words, skilled workers should not do preparation and servicing tasks. The said works, this principle stipulates, should be done by unskilled workers. This principle stipulates that the company should have two sets of workers on hold. One group of the workers should be skilled, and should be involved in the thinking for the company. The other group of workers should be of workers who only work. This is irrelevant in today’s work place. Companies like IT&T tried it at the beginning of the last century. The company’s managers and top engineers were making all the decisions. The manual workers were left out of the decision making process. The result was that there were schisms in the company. Productivity went down. The management found Taylorism not applicable (Hartness, 1912). The second principle states that planning and doing should be separated. The third principle states that unskilled and skilled labour should be separated. This calls for planning to be left to managers, and doing to be left to unskilled workers. This separation of work is not practical. This principle is not relevant in today’s world for reasons that are similar to those advanced for the second principle (Taylor, 1903). This is because the modern workplace requires team work and team spirit. This principle would only be applicable in extreme situations. These are situations that are not applicable in the present situation. The situations are like working on a large farm that is not mechanized. This is the only place where this principle is applicable. It is also important to note that, during the time of Taylor, mechanization had not picked. It was not practiced (Michael, 2005). An applicant for many jobs are required to have team spirit.The emphasis today is on strong interpersonal skills. Cooperation in the work place is the quality employers are looking for in the present dispensation. The work places today require a high level of interactions. The various departments have to cooperate in order for the company to survive. The third principle of Taylor cannot fit in the contemporary work place. It is irrelevant and obsolete. Labour cannot be separated (Michael, 2005). The fourth principle forwarded by scientific management calls for the minimization task skill requirement. It also involves the reduction of job learning time. This principle is seen to overflow on the other three principles. It is also the most specific of the five principles posted by scientific management. The first, primary objective of the fourth principle is to minimize the skill requirements of a task or job. A variety of methods are used to accomplish this objective. The first notable method is the introduction of technology to the work place. This method is largely attributed to Henry Ford and the mass production of vehicles. The specific skills required to operate production machinery is, for instance, less than the skill involved in a contemporary job, maybe in a software company (Noble,1984). The second objective of the fourth principle, as has been mentioned, is the minimization of the time required to learn a job. This follows in the wake of minimizing skills required in the job. The result of the fourth principle is evident in the work place today. The control of labour is removed from the labour process (Taylor, 1911). This means that the worker has only the skills that are specific to his or her area. The worker is restricted in his or her area of work by the skills he or she possesses. The idea of company segmentation is continued. There is the fragmentation of jobs in the work place. A separation is evident in planning and doing tasks in the work place. Skilled and unskilled labour is separated. Responsibilities become assigned depending on the relevant skills. If some worker fails in their responsibilities, the whole company is affected (Rosen, 1993). Most companies operate in complete disregard to this principle. These include companies like IBM and Hewllet Packard. These computer manufacturing companies know the importance of skills in the current work place. They have consistently searched for the best engineers from the top universities in the world. This is because they understand that skills are the drivers of the contemporary economy. This principle of minimizing skills has limited applicability in the work place. Like the first principle, the principle is only applicable in assembly line settings. To a large extend, then, the principle is not overly evident in today’s corporations. This is due to the fact that contemporary human resource approaches stress the importance of people in any business. Human resource sees people as the greatest asset a company can have (Thompson, 1989). The earlier idea that people in the business are an inconvenience has been discarded. Today employers are investing heavily in employees. This investment is done through extensive training and regular training among other employee motivation programs. This investment in the employee gives the employer a competitive advantage. This competitive advantage is that their employees are highly trained and that they are also highly adaptable in the work place (Menzies, 1996). The fifth and final principle promotes the idea of less substance or material handling in the contemporary work place. This is made to reduce the movement of workers as they carry materials through the design of machines. This principle is concerned with the efficiency of workers and machines in the work place. This is especially so in the factory setting where there are machines, and men or women to man those machines. Taylor envisioned a single worker operating a single machine with minimum skill (Stalin, 1976). This is not the case in the modern scenario. This is because technology has become extremely advanced. This means that the workers required are extremely highly skilled people. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon Utility Company require highly skilled workers.Most companies require highly skilled engineers and technicians. Factories in the modern set up are complex places that have complicated machines (Mullins, 2004). The workers that have to man these machines are required to have complex skills. This is because the machines that labourers have to use are highly complex. These machines range from machines that are in use in nuclear factories to machines that are used in the manufacture of micro-processors. The fifth principle thus pales in light of these revelations (Braverman, 1998). Based on the observations made in the paper, the management theories advanced by Frederick Winslow Taylor are outdated. They have no place in the modern work place, in any part of the world. Various reasons have been advanced by the paper why scientific management ideas are irrelevant in the contemporary setting. Further more, not all jobs in the market can be subjected to scientific observation.The trend that is in vogue today is to encourage teamwork. Currently, because of human resource pressures, the importance has been shifted to employees in the company. This goes against the ideas postulated in scientific management (Milkman, 1998). As the paper has been saying all along, it is crucial to consider the timescale on which the ideas of Taylor are based. The jobs that are on the market currently are another consideration to be made. The postulations of Taylor were first made about 100years ago. This is one of the reasons why the author of this paper believes that Taylorism is invalid. That one century since the advent of scientific management has been a long one. The work place has experienced a multitude of changes (Ciulla, 2000). The changes in the work place have done much to invalidate the theories of scientific management. The changes have been wrought by happenings in the world since the advent of Taylorism. One of the happenings that have shaped the work place is the economic depression of the 1930s. This global depression and economic recession contributed to massive losses of jobs all over the world. From 1929 to 1933, there was widespread suffering in the world. When the world recovered from this depression, there were drastic changes in the work place. Working practices were drastically redefined how work is done across the globe. The birth of the Internet revolutionized work. This is because one can now work at home. The Internet has also made the practice of outsourcing to be much cheaper (Besieger, 1988). The advances in technology have made working quite different. It has changed the way jobs are done all over the world. If Taylor was alive today, he would be the first one to revise his ideas. Another aspect to consider, that makes Taylorism invalid, is the fact that workers are different. This is because Taylorism tends to prescribe uniformity in work and working methods. Thus, one way that seems efficient for one worker might not be efficient for another individual. Even if performance increases after some period when Taylorism is applied, this cannot last for long. This is because workers are human. This is to mean that they have personal needs. Workers will definitely have interpersonal frictions in the work place. Another thing is that workers face, or encounter real difficulties when their jobs become so efficient and routinised (Besieger, 1988). This is because workers become rigid. Also, lack of time to relax makes them hate the workplace and their work. Making work routine makes workers stop innovating new things. It kills their creativity. Workers also become dissatisfied with the work environment and end up angry. In fact, scientific management goes a long way into increasing the conflicts that exist between laborers’ and the management. The conflicts between the labourers and the management lead to the formation and strengthening of labour unions. The idea of labour unions is one that Taylor tried to prevent by postulating scientific management theories. In the far worse scenarios, the application of the methods of Taylor can lead to labour disputes. It can lead to labour disputes like industrial strikes (Aitken, 1985). What the paper has found out is that Taylorism is not applicable in today’s world. The timescale has changed greatly since the advent of his ideas. It is important to note that those ideas were formulated during the industrial revolution. During the era of mechanization, the said ideas had not been effectively implemented. It is also crucial to note that Taylor was unable to implement most of his ideas in his day. The companies he worked with suffered greatly in the wake of Taylor implementing his ideas. These include companies like Midvale, Asernal, Watertown and the Link-Belt Corporation among others (Aitken, 1985). Thus, if the ideas were inapplicable in his time, it means that they cannot be applicable in our time. This is because the ideas failed in the industrial age .They failed at the start of the age of mechanization. This means that they cannot succeed in this era of information technology. The practice of segmentation of work is obsolete. Decision making today involves virtually all employees in a company. The time when the top management used to make blanket decisions for the company is over. The work place also requires employees to have complex skills. This is due to the introduction of automation in the work place (Lowe, 2000). Thus, Taylorism is irrelevant in the contemporary world. Only a few elements of scientific management principles can be borrowed, and incorporated in to the work place today. Otherwise, Taylorism served its purpose in a past generation. Other management theories are going to serve the current generation.   References Aitken, G. J. (1985). Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908- 1915. Princeton: Princeton University Press.  Baldry, C., Peter, B. & Taylor (1998). Bright satanic offices: intensification, control and team Taylorism. London: Blackwell. Besieger, M.R. (1988). Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power. London, UK: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd.  Braverman, H. (1998) [1974]. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: W.W.Norton.  Ciulla, B. (2000). The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work. New York, NY: Bantam. Michael (2005). The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life. 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In the Age of the Smart Machine. New York: Norton. Read More