Business Philosophy - Motivational Theories Part 2

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) 

Frederick Winslow Taylor was an American mechanical engineer who is regarded as the 'father of scientific management.' He was born on March 20th 1856 in Philadelphia, and was home schooled by his mother before studying for 2 years in France and Germany.  Initially Taylor intended to attend Harvard to become a lawyer like his father, but due to health reasons became an apprentice machinist at Enterprise Hydraulic Works.

Taylor moved from here after his apprenticeship to Midvale Steel Works and was rapidly promoted due to his talent finally holding the position of chief engineer. In his early days at Midvale, Taylor recognised that people were not running machines to their full potential; this was known as 'soldiering' and was mentioned in his 1903 paper 'Shop Management',

 "The greater part of the systematic soldiering, however, is done by the men with the deliberate object of keeping their employers ignorant of how fast work can be done. So universal is soldiering for this purpose, or under any of the ordinary systems of compensating labour, who does not devote a considerable part of his time to studying just how slowly he can work and still convince his employer that he is going at a good pace."

Taylor also Worked for the Manufacturing Investment Company and after ran his own independent consulting practice using his experience as a manager and perfecting his management system.

Taylor joined Bethlehem Steel, a company that operated large paper mills, in 1898 to solve the expensive machine shop capacity. Whilst here he created high speed steel with Maunsel White and their assistants, before leaving in 1901 after arguments with other managers.

Taylor was a believer of finding 'the one best way of management' and developed his management system to try and perfect production management. In his paper, Principles of Scientific Management (1911) Taylor said that,

"The labour should include rest breaks so that the worker has time to recover from fatigue. Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type. The man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for this very reason entirely unsuited to what would, for him, be the grinding monotony of work of this character. Therefore the workman who is best suited to handling pig iron is unable to understand the real science of doing this class of work." 

We can see from this quote that Taylor believed that a worker should always be of a less intelligence than is required to complete the tasks he is given, this is something he mentioned on more than one occasion.

Taylor's scientific management consisted of four principles:

• Replace rule of thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.
• Scientifically select, train, and develop each employee rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.
• Provide "Detailed instruction and supervision of each worker in the performance of that worker's discrete task" 
• Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks

"A fair days wage, for a fair days work," and objective of the labour movement, was something that Taylor believed in. Taylor used a  piece rate system, where two rates of pay were set a higher and lower, if the workers achieved the higher target they received the higher rate of pay, if they did not they would receive a lower rate of pay. Taylor studied people working and realised that if a piece rate system was put in place that productivity would increase and employees would work closer to their potential than if the rate was not in place. Taylor came to the conclusion that money was therefore directly proportionate to motivation. Taylor wrote in his Shop Management paper regarding piece rate:

"After a workman has had the price per piece of the work he is doing lowered two or three times as a result of his having worked harder and increased his output, he is likely to entirely lose sight of his employer's side of the case and to become imbued with a grim determination to have no more cuts if soldiering can prevent it." 

The disadvantages of Taylor's piece rate system are:

•  It does not guarantee a minimum wage for the workers.
•  The system is very harsh to the inefficient workers because they lose wages due to lower rate and lower output.
• It penalises a worker who just fails to attain the standard by a narrow margin

Personally I disagree with Taylor's theory that money and motivation are linked. I believe that there are many factors of motivation, not just financial incentive. If Taylor was correct then there would not be cases of people winning money through the lottery or inheritance for example and continuing with work or investment yet I don't believe that many people would work for no profitable gain what so ever. To me it seems then that there is more than just one factor of motivation and not purely money.

In my next post I will introduce George Elton Mayo and explain his contribution to motivational philosophy. To read part 2 please follow the link below.
http://christopherharrisengineer.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/george-eltonmayo-1880-1949-george.html