SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT
Team Building Glossary
Team Building — Scientific Management
Information on Scientific Management
Scientific management is very rational and very control-oriented. It
tried to make the work world predictable, with as little
variation as possible. Scores of Time and Motion, clipboard carrying
analysts noting every step, operation, and associated times characterised this
management trend. Job processes and products were broken down into
their smallest, simplest elements, making them easy to learn and
easy to oversee. In this way, mistakes could be easily
contained. Non-skilled employees could learn relatively simple jobs easily.
This control
model required many layers of supervision to ensure things ran
smoothly. It resulted in multilayered hierarchical management structures. With very
small spans of control and authority vested higher in the
hierarchy, employees had little discretion. They knew their particular jobs,
and their jobs only. They were not expected to think;
interaction was discouraged. People were "cogs in the wheel".
In sum,
scientific management downplayed the importance of the human system,
while emphasising the technical. This rational focus, while producing some
marvellous gains in productivity, had unfortunate, unanticipated human consequences. It
led to feelings of alienation. It led to apathy and
resentment, and fostered management-employee antipathy, opposition, and antagonism. This was
powerfully illustrated in the 1936 Charlie Chaplin film Modern Times,
in which the protagonist worker functions like a machine on
the assembly line, only to become trapped on a conveyor
belt and run through a manufacturing machine. Our hero also
becomes a test dummy for a feeding machine and is
spied upon in the toilet by management. The title Modern
Times is innuendo for the Machine Age and the movie
epitomises some of the worst attributes of the Industrial Revolution.
Other topics in our resources on Team Building related to Scientific Management include:
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