Frederick Winslow Taylor was born on March the 20th 1856. He was a mechanical engineer whose goal was to improve industrial efficiency.
Taylor was born to a very rich family in Germantown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Taylor's father, Franklin Taylor was a Princeton lawyer and his mother, Emily Annette Taylor was an abolitionist. He focused most his career improving his management and machining methods through lecturing, writing, and consulting. Taylor who was recognized for scientific management was a pre classical contributor.
He was known for creating a system that stated the relationship of workers and managers through the introduction of new science technology. Scientific management involves scientifically searching for the best way to achieve each duty given to an individual and how it affects work productivity, however Taylor had various ideas to introduce this system such as providing the best equipments and work conditions and ensuring that there was proper cooperation which would assure that work would be done faster.In addition to this the workers were to have proper understanding of what they were doing or what task they were given to do. Taylor had a theory that man was a rational economic animal who was mainly concerned with gaining money.
He understood that people would have been treated like machines therefore he came up with an idea which would of motivated people to work and this was ‘money’, thus he decided that workers should be pay fairly once they performed there task as given and that pay should be related to productivity.Alone with this system came many advantages and disadvantages which would of affected organizations both positive and negative. One of these advantages was firstly the "Time and Motion Study". Taylor would break a job down into sections and measure each section to a hundredth of a minute. The advantages of this theory are that organizations became much more successful and flexible. Also, each individual member of staff were scientifically trained and developed rather than leaving them to train themselves, giving them a much more successful working environment and the ability to have a long term working relationship.
Another advantage was the increase in productivity. This introduced new and improved methods of production and removal of wastage and inefficiency in undertaking the production activities. There were also a variety of disadvantages which included treating people like machines and not useful to deal with groups or teams. Today organizations are still using Taylor’s scientific management system to determine their roles within an organization, and also develop and train people to be subject matter experts, consequently this will put the right people in the right job.
