Frederick Taylor scientific organization of labor. Main works of F

Business 31.12.2023
Business

Taylor Winslow Frederick(1856-1915) - founder of the school of scientific management, American practical engineer and manager. In 1875, Taylor went to work in a workshop in Philadelphia, where he served as a mechanic and model maker. Three years later, he got a job at the Midvale Steel Company, where he quickly advanced from simple mechanics to chief engineer. In 1883, while studying by correspondence, Taylor received a diploma in mechanical engineering. He was an outstanding inventor and received more than 100 patents during his life. Most famous is the creation of high-speed steel by him and White.

While still working at Midvale, Taylor began to introduce principles into labor organization and production process management that later became part of the scientific management system. Since 1890, Taylor worked as the general manager of a company that produced paper fiber, and since 1893, as a management consulting engineer at several enterprises. In 1898-1901 Taylor worked exclusively at the Bethlehem Steel Company, where he actively introduced his innovations.

Taylor became widely known in 1912 after his speech at the hearings of the House Select Committee on the Study of Shop Management Systems.

Before Taylor, management meant the most unexpected things, right down to the technology for manufacturing a particular product. He was the first to give this concept the qualitative definition of “organization of production” or, to take a broader aspect, “rational organization in general.”

In his main work, “The Scientific Organization of Labor” (1911), Taylor formulated a number of postulates that were called “Taylorism.” Instead of vague and rather contradictory principles of management, Taylor put forward a strict scientific system of knowledge about the laws of rational organization of labor, the constituent elements of which are a mathematical method of calculating costs, a differential system of remuneration, a method of studying time and movements (timing), a method of dividing and rationalizing labor techniques, instructions cards and much more. Summarizing the essence of his system, Taylor wrote: “Science instead of traditional skills; harmony instead of contradictions; collaboration instead of individual work; maximum performance instead of limiting performance; development of each individual worker to the maximum permissible productivity and maximum well-being.”

Taylorism is based on four principles (rules of management):

1) creation of a scientific foundation that replaces old, purely practical methods of work, scientific research of each individual type of work activity;


2) selection of workers and managers based on scientific criteria, their vocational selection and vocational training;

3) cooperation between the administration and workers in the practical implementation of NOT;

4) equal and fair distribution of duties (responsibilities) between workers and managers.

Frederick Taylor is the largest representative of American and world management thought, one of the founders of the scientific organization of labor (SLO) and production management, which became widespread first in the USA and then throughout the industrial world. In his works, such as “Scientific Foundations of the Organization of Industrial Enterprises”, “Scientific Organization of Labor”, etc., Taylor formulated new principles of remuneration and enterprise management, based on deep specialization and rationalization of labor operations. He came up with the idea of ​​functional management, designed to displace the linear system. An important element of Taylor's management scheme was the creation of such divisions in the structure of the enterprise as planning and distribution departments. For the first time in the world practice of labor organization and management, he formulated the task of studying the elements of time and establishing norms and tasks, developed his own wage system, abolishing equalization, substantiated the need for constant study of labor movements, and introduced the technological documentation he developed. Taylor's rationalistic concept of organizing personnel management has grown into the classical school of management, which presupposes the following principles of management: individual employee responsibility for the performance of job duties and tasks; strict division of spheres of activity; priority of individual forms of organization and stimulation of labor; the use of rational techniques and methods of work according to the criterion of minimum time for their implementation; labor rationing; the predominance of economic incentives over all other types; authoritarian leadership style.

It was written in 1911, but even in 2016 it is read with great interest. The author is so strong as a manager that even now he would give a head start to many modern managers. The author is not the owner of the factory, but an employee and also a consultant.

On a much larger scale, however, this systematic slowing down of the pace of work is carried out by the workers, with the conscious intention of leaving their employers in the dark as to how fast the work can actually be done.

Times were shaggy, and work at enterprises was built on the principle " initiative and encouragement ": the management of the enterprise gave out information about what exactly needed to be done, but the worker himself had to answer the question “how to do it?” There was no technology, there was no. The workers learned to perform production operations by observing their closest neighbors. Therefore, the work was carried out according to the principle of “who can do what.” The management hoped that if someone exerts more effort and completes more work (initiative), then he will receive a bonus (encouragement).
Payment was usually given to the entire team as a whole, so there was no point in working more than others for a worker. With such an organization of labor, one cannot expect large profits, so the wages were such that the worker walked barefoot most of the time for reasons of economy.

What does it offer?


  1. Select the most suitable people for each specific job;

  2. Conduct a study of the most effective performance of each type of work (necessarily in such a volume that this work can be performed for years. A sprinter, having run 100 meters, cannot tell a marathon runner to run all 40 kilometers in this way);

  3. each worker engaged in this activity (Attention! Not only written instructions! A live instructor!);

  4. When the established productivity level is reached, pay the worker a salary higher than the average for other enterprises (+60% to the salary with a 3.6-fold increase in productivity. Taylor derived this experimentally. No more, no less). Ignoring this point led to strikes.

  5. Those who cannot cope with the norm should be transferred to other jobs or fired;

  6. Continue to improve the method, accept rationalization proposals from workers.

Please note that "best performing research" is not the same as "".

Taylor's method of finding an effective method is a thorough study worthy of admiration.

Study No. 1 - loading cast iron ingots into a railway car

Taylor managed to ensure that a working team of 75 pig iron porters with a productivity of 12.5 tons per person per day reached such a productivity that each person began to carry 47 tons per day for each individual person.

The salary of each worker before the start of the research was $1.15 per day.

Taylor and his assistant selected a suitable worker to carry out the tests and promised to pay him $1.85 a day if he followed all their orders exactly.

“Tomorrow you will do exactly what this man tells you, from morning until night. When he orders you to pick up the blank and go, you will pick it up and go, and when he tells you to sit down and rest, you will sit down and rest And you will do this all day long. And then one more thing: do not talk in vain! A person who is worth a lot does exactly what he is told and does not talk in vain."


What would be the worker's responses if he were spoken to in the way that is customary under the system of "initiative and encouragement"? For example, in the following expressions: “Well, Schmidt, you are a first-class iron porter and know your business well. You worked at a rate of 12.5 tons per day. I have studied the subject of carrying cast iron very thoroughly and am convinced that you are able to do much more work in a day than you are now doing. Tell me, don’t you think that if you tried really hard, you could move 47 tons of pig iron per day, instead of 12.5 tons?

How do you think a worker would respond to this?

If he had been allowed to handle a pile of 47 tons of pig iron without the direction and guidance of a man who had learned the art or science of carrying pig iron, in his quest to earn increased wages he would in all likelihood have worked himself to the point of exhaustion by 11 or 12 hours of the day. He would work so continuously that his muscles would not have sufficient rest time, which is absolutely necessary for their recovery. On the contrary, after a person acquainted with the law governing this kind of work had stood over him day after day and directed his work, until he had acquired the habit of resting as often as necessary, he could then work at an even pace for a period of time. all day without tiring yourself too much.

After that, they left only every eighth worker, the most suitable for this worker, at work carrying cast iron, and the rest were removed from this work and transferred to other types of work. Taylor and his assistant trained all the remaining workers to carry pig iron and set them a daily wage of $1.86 a day.

Study No. 2 - shoveling

Taylor continued his experiments. The company where he worked had 600 people shoveling. They were all organized into teams with one supervisor per team.

Taylor or his assistants timed the shovel work and tried to determine at what load on the shovel maximum daily productivity was achieved. Based on this, he developed his own type of shovel for each type of raw material: the smallest shovel for iron ore, because the density of this substance was the highest. Very large shovels were developed for coal or ash, because... this material is very light. A total of 10 types of shovels were developed.

Thousands of experiments have been carried out with a stopwatch: if a worker collects coal with a shovel from the ground, if he sticks a shovel into the middle of a pile, if a pile lies on a wooden floor, if a pile lies on an iron floor, etc.

Tooling and training of men was carried out so that the average load per shovel tended to 21 pounds (8.6 kg). With such a load, the worker did not become tired ahead of time, and at the same time, his load was not ridiculously small.

Every morning, each worker received a piece of paper on which it was written what types of shovels he should get from the storekeeper, where he should go to work and how many tons of material should be transferred there. If the worker met the standard, he was paid $1.85, and if not, then $1.15 and sent to a shovel training instructor.

Taylor found that the speed of each worker in a team is reduced to the speed of the slowest worker, or even lower, because If payments are given equally to everyone, then no one wants to work faster than others. Therefore, he prohibited workers from organizing into teams and introduced a policy in which each worker received his own individual task and his own individual pay.

This supervision of each worker individually entailed the need to build a special office building for the manager and clerks, whose responsibility was entrusted to this branch of labor. In this office, a work plan was developed for each individual worker, and employees moved workers from place to place, having before their eyes detailed diagrams and maps of the yard, similar to the way chess moves on a chessboard. For the same purpose, a system of telephone messengers and couriers was organized. In this way the great loss of time caused by having too many men in one place and too few in another, and by wasting unproductive intervals between the execution of separate works, was almost completely eliminated.
Also, this organization consisted of several persons engaged in developing the science of this branch of labor, by studying the proper hours of work, as above described; then, from other people, for the most part the most skilled workers, who served as instructors: helping the workers and guiding them in their work; further, from the people who stored the tools in the warehouse, whose duties were to issue the workers with the proper tools and keep them in perfect order.

As a result of all the optimizations, he kept only 140 of the 600 shovel workers on the job, and transferred the rest to other positions.

Taylor foresaw that he would be accused of what is shown in this picture:

That is, the fact that he reduced the number of people creating value and greatly increased the number of those who “eat this value.”

Therefore, he immediately cites all the monetary indicators that indicate that the enterprise has received enormous financial benefits. In addition, the workers themselves also received financial benefits, for which they were very grateful to him.

The average number of tons of output per person per day was 16 tons, became 59 tons.

The average cost of processing one ton was $0.072 and became $0.033.

In calculating the cost of $0.033 per ton, the cost of building an office and tool store and the compensation of all labor agents, supervisors, clerks, timekeepers, etc. are included.

During that year, the total savings under the new system over the old system was $38,417.69, and during the next six months, when all the work in the factory yard was completely transferred to the lesson system, the savings amounted to $80,000 in year.

Moreover, he did all this without even holding the position of general director. As far as I understand, he was the chief mechanic. Where we studied, he taught.

A quick aside: Few things in the workplace irritate me more than when a manager begins to measure the efficiency of a production system by the percentage of value-providing and "support" personnel. Their views were refuted back in 1911. The enterprise should be assessed according to other criteria.

Competitors

A competing plant did not have enough workers to unload the same ore from the same cars. They also learned that Taylor had a superior set of workers under his leadership, so they announced that they were offering 4.9 cents per ton versus the 3.2 cents they were getting from Taylor.

Taylor considered that it was unreasonable to raise the rate following his competitors and calmly released those workers who wanted to quit.
Less than 6 weeks later, most of them were back to load ore for 3.2 cents per ton.

“Yes, sir, I’ll tell you how it happened. When we got there, Jimmy and I, we were assigned to unload the car along with eight other workers. We started shoveling ore in the same manner as we do here. Less than half an hour had passed when I noticed that some little devil next to me was hardly working at all. I told him: “Why aren’t you doing anything? If we don’t unload the ore from the wagon, we won’t be paid on the day of settlement.” He turned to me and asked: “Who the hell are you?” “Okay,” I said, “it’s none of your business.” Then the little devil stood right in front of me and said: “You don’t mind your own business, or I’ll throw you off this carriage!” Well, of course, I could spit on him and drown him in my spit, but the rest of the workers lowered their shovels and pretended to take his side. Then I turned to Jimmy, and said so that the whole party of workers could hear: “Okay, Jimmy, you and I, we will dump a full shovel every time this little devil dumps his, and not a single shovel more!” So we watched him and worked only when he worked. When settlement day came, it turned out that we had earned less money than here. After this, Jimmy and I went to the overseer and asked him to let the two of us unload a separate car, just like we did here. But he told us not to interfere in something other than our own business. When the day of settlement came again, we again received less money than here. Then Jimmy and I gathered our whole party and brought them back here to work."

Study No. 3 - bricklaying

This study was not carried out by Taylor, but by Frank B. Gilbreth. He gives all the details of his analysis of this branch of labor in the chapter entitled "The Study of Movements" of his book entitled "The Brickwork System." Taylor refers to it in his book.

Through special experiments, he took into account every single, even the most insignificant element that in any respect had an impact on the speed and fatigue of the mason worker. He established the exact position that each of the mason's feet should occupy in relation to the wall being built, the pile of cement and the pile of bricks, and thus freed him from the need to take a step or two towards the pile of bricks and back again every time he he lays one brick.

He found out the most convenient height for a pile of cement and a pile of bricks and, on the basis of this, drew a plan for a mobile platform with a table placed on it, on which all the materials necessary for the worker are located at hand and which thus allows the proper relative arrangement of the bricks to be constantly maintained , cement and the worker himself. Such platforms are set up as the wall rises upward, for all individual masons by a workman specially appointed for this purpose, and thus the mason is freed from the unnecessary necessity of bending down to the level of his feet behind each brick and behind each trowel of cement, and then straightening up. again.

As a result of further study of the issue, it was established that immediately after unloading the bricks from the carts and before delivering them to the masons, they should be carefully sorted by special workers. The bricks are then laid with their smoothest surface upon a plain plank of wood, so arranged as to enable the mason to take up each individual brick with the greatest speed and in the most convenient manner. The mason is thus spared the necessity of turning the brick before his eyes on each side and each end in order to examine it before laying it. He thereby saves the time spent on deciding which edge and which end is best to lay the brick so that it falls on the outside of the wall. In most cases, it also saves the time spent on removing individual bricks from a disorderly pile lying on the scaffolding. Orderly “stacks” of bricks are installed by a handy worker in the proper position on a mobile platform in close proximity to a pile of cement mortar.

We are all accustomed to seeing how masons tap each brick several times, after placing it on its cement bed, with the end of the trowel handle in order to establish the proper thickness of the cement layer. Mr. Gilbreth found that by suitably adjusting the thickness of the mortar, the bricks could easily be laid in the proper manner by simply applying downward pressure to the laying hand. He ensured that his cement kneaders paid special attention to establishing the proper thickness of the mortar and thus saved the time usually spent by the mason in fitting the brick by tapping it with the handle of a trowel.

As a result, he increased his productivity from 120 bricks per person per hour to 350 bricks per person per hour.

Study #4 - Sorting Bicycle Bearings

Here Taylor had already arrived at another enterprise as a consultant.

This is what he saw: 120 girls were engaged in the technical inspection of balls for bearings. Their working day was 10.5 hours and another half on Saturday.

They worked like this: they put several balls on the palm of their hand, looked at them closely under strong lighting, rolling them back and forth. The defective ones were selected with a magnet.

The defects on the balls were so small that they were completely invisible to an untrained person. Therefore, the work required the most concentrated attention and quickly became tiring.

Taylor got to work:

The first thing he noticed was that the girls spent most of the 10.5-hour workday chatting because the workday was too long and they were so tired.

He gave them the right to vote whether they agreed to shorten the working day by half an hour while maintaining the same wages and the same production standards. To his shock, he received a unanimous refusal to change anything. Then he “slammed his fist on the table,” canceled this vote and ordered the working day to be reduced to 10 hours, then to 9.5; until 9 and after that until 8.5.

It turned out that all the girls continued to cope with the daily production norm.

The second step, he decided to select the most capable workers: he conducted a study on the speed of recognition reaction of each of the workers. As soon as a familiar symbol (letter) was introduced into the worker’s field of vision, she had to press a button. Thus, he measured the speed of recognition and reaction of each of the workers and fired the least capable ones.

Since there was more free space, the third step was to seat the workers as far apart as possible to make it difficult for them to chat.

The fourth step is time to work on productivity. But he was in no hurry to do this until he was sure that he could control the quality. Therefore, as a fourth step, he decided to deprive them of the opportunity to work carelessly. To do this, he created a second line of ball control, which consisted of the most conscientious workers. The second line, consisting of only 4 people, double-checked the balls after the first line, and the numbering of the boxes was done in such a way that the workers of the second line did not know who exactly from the first line they were checking each of the specific boxes.

After this, Taylor created a third line of rechecking, consisting of a chief inspector. She randomly checked some boxes.

Frederick Winslow Taylor

"Principles of Scientific Management"

F. W. Taylor- recognized founder of scientific enterprise management - management. In the book F. W. Taylor“Principles of Scientific Management” examines the main elements of the famous “Taylor system”.

Introduction.

President Roosevelt, in his welcoming address to the governors at the White House, prophetically observed that "the preservation of our national wealth is only a particular in relation to the more general question of the productivity of national labor."

The whole country quickly realized the importance of preserving our material wealth, and this was the beginning of a broad social movement that will undoubtedly lead to major results in the direction of the goal. On the contrary, we have hitherto been very unclear about the importance of “the more general question of increasing the productivity of our national labor.”

We can see directly how our forests are disappearing, how our water energy is wasted unused, how our soil is being washed away by the sea, and the end of our coal and iron reserves is a matter of the near future. On the other hand, the immeasurably large waste of human energy that occurs daily in the mass of our actions that are erroneous, misdirected or unfulfilled - the very actions that Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of "national productivity" - this waste is less obvious , is less noticeable, and its dimensions are therefore very unclear to us.

We can see and feel the leakage of material wealth. On the contrary, awkward, misdirected and unproductive human actions leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Assessing them requires an act of memory on our part, an effort of imagination. And because of this, although our daily losses from this source are much greater than those due to the waste of material goods, the latter affects us deeply, while the former makes very little impression on us.

Until now there has been no public agitation for "increasing national productivity" and no meetings have been held to discuss how to achieve it. And yet, there is undeniable evidence that the need to increase productivity is created by broad sectors of the nation.

The search for better, more competent people to perform functions - from the presidents of our large companies down to domestic servants, inclusive - has never been more pressing than in our time, and the demand for knowledgeable, well-trained people has never been greater than the limited supply .

However, what we are all looking for is a ready trained person who has been taught by someone else. Only when we fully realize that it is our duty to systematically cooperate in order to learn and create this knowledgeable person, and that we have the full opportunity to achieve this, instead of hunting for a person who has been taught by someone else. the other is that only then will we be on the path to increasing our national productivity. In the past, the prevailing view was well expressed in the words: “Captains of industry are born, but they are made.” This theory believed that you just have to get a “real” person, and the methods of his activity will follow. In the future, everyone will understand that our leaders must be well trained, as well as born outstanding, and that none. an outstanding man cannot (under the old system of personal leadership) compete with a few ordinary men who are so organized as to achieve good results in their joint activities.

In the past, the most important thing was the personality; in the future the most important thing will be the system. This, however, should not mean that we do not need outstanding personalities. On the contrary, the first task of any good organizational system is the task of generating first-class ideas, and with systematic organization of work, the best worker rises faster and more surely than ever before.

This book was written:

Firstly, in order to show, by a number of simple examples, the enormous losses that the whole country suffers due to the insufficient productivity of most acts of our daily activity;

Secondly, - to try to convince the reader that the cure for this productivity lies in the systematic organization of work, and not in the search for any unusual or extravagant personality;

Thirdly, in order to prove that the best organization of labor is a real science, based on clearly defined laws, rules and principles as its foundation. And further, in order to show that the basic principles of scientific organization are equally applicable to all types of human activity, from our simplest individual actions down to the work of our large public organizations, which requires the most developed cooperation. In short, this book seeks to convince the reader, through a series of illustrative illustrations, that wherever these principles are properly applied, the results of their application are sure to be absolutely astonishing.

This work was originally intended as a report to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Therefore, the examples we have chosen are such that we hope they will make a particularly strong impression on engineers and directors of industrial enterprises, as well as on all those workers who are employed in these enterprises. We still hope that it will be clear to other readers how the same principles can be applied with equal success to all types of social activity: to the organization of our households, to the management of our farms, to the conduct of commercial transactions by our merchants, large and small; to the organization of our churches, philanthropic institutions, universities and government agencies.

Chapter 1. Prerequisites for scientific management.

§ 1. The main task of organizing an enterprise.

The main task of enterprise management should be to ensure maximum profit for the entrepreneur, coupled with maximum welfare for each employee employed in the enterprise.

We use the words “maximum profit” in a broad sense and mean not only large dividends for a joint-stock company or the sole owner of an enterprise, but also the development of each individual branch of business to the highest level of perfection, ensuring the constant nature of the realization of this profit.

Likewise, “maximum welfare for every worker in the enterprise” means not only higher remuneration than is usually received by people in his profession, but, much more importantly, it also means the development of each worker to the maximum degree of productivity available to him that would allow to give him, generally speaking, work of the highest quality, within the limits of his natural abilities; and further, it means providing him, if possible, with work of precisely this quality.

The fact that achieving maximum profit for the entrepreneur, coupled with maximum well-being for the workers employed in his enterprise, should be the two most important tasks of enterprise management seems to be so self-evident that even the very mention of it seems unnecessary. And yet it is certain that everywhere in the industrial world a large part of organized employers, as well as organized workers, stands for war and not for peace, and that, perhaps, the majority of both sides do not believe in the possibility of regulating their relations in this way so that the interests of both parties become identical.

Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915) is a famous practical engineer and manager, who is rightly called the father of management. Taylor's main views are set out in the books “Enterprise Management” (1903), “Principles of Scientific Management” (1911).

Taylor actively addressed the problem of rationalizing production and labor in order to increase productivity and efficiency. According to the opinion and experience of F. Taylor, limited (minimum) labor productivity in many workshops seemed to workers as a kind of norm (which they were not going to exceed). He called this approach “pretense” (soldiering-pretend that you are working, “hack”, “behind”). At the same time, he divided pretense into natural and systemic. Natural pretense is the tendency of workers to lighten the load. Systemic pretense is, on the one hand, a reduction in workers’ productivity due to, as F. Taylor put it, a short-sighted assessment of their own interests, and on the other, the willingness of managers to accept as normal this significantly less than optimal level of workers’ productivity.

In his work “Enterprise Management,” F. Taylor divided workers into middle and first class workers. In his opinion, middle class workers, who are the majority, when given any opportunity, tend to evade the proper performance of duties. In particular, Taylor noted that “the tendency of the average man (in all walks of life) is expressed in his tendency to wander at a leisurely pace; he can quicken his pace only after much reflection and observation, or, say, experiencing remorse or under the influence of external circumstances... This tendency to relaxation is clearly enhanced when a large number of workers are engaged in the same work and at the same work rates. With such an organization of work, the best people slowly but surely merge with the main indifferent and inert mass.”

Taylor believed that the problem of low productivity could be solved by applying a method he called "scientific timekeeping". One of the original goals in developing this method was to determine the actual time required to perform a certain operation. The essence of the method was to divide the work into a sequence of elementary operations, which were timed and recorded with the assistance of workers. The method proposed by Taylor made it possible to obtain accurate information about the required time spent on performing a particular job, thereby optimizing the algorithm of workers’ activities and providing new opportunities for control over all aspects of production related to equipment, machines, materials and work methods.

Later, in his work “Principles of Scientific Management,” Taylor put forward three fundamental principles of scientific management:

  • 1) replacement of decisions made by the worker performing this function with scientifically based decisions;
  • 2) scientific selection and training of workers, requiring the study of their qualities, education and training, instead of their haphazard selection and training;
  • 3) close cooperation between managers and workers, allowing them to carry out their work in accordance with established scientific laws and patterns, and not an arbitrary solution to each individual problem by an individual worker. The application of F. Taylor's method in various companies gave

significant economic results. At the same time, it led to significant job losses and layoffs, causing justifiable concern among both workers and trade unions. As a result, Taylor had many critics who accused him of allegedly considering workers to be something like robots and striving solely to increase the level of production, while completely neglecting the human factor. Concerns were also expressed that the full implementation of scientific management will inevitably lead to the devaluation of existing skills and crafts, to a gradual decrease in the need for skilled labor, which will be algorithmized to such an extent that any person “from the street will be able to replace the master.”

The methods provoked such a strong reaction from American trade unions that they launched a joint campaign against the introduction and spread of scientific management. As a result, Taylor even appeared before a special Congressional commission created specifically to deal with “this kind of production management systems.” Despite Taylor's completely rational and logical objections, his statements were little heard under the noisy din of criticism. As a result, clauses were introduced into the appropriations bill prohibiting the use of such methods, most notably the use of a stopwatch.

However, despite severe criticism and resistance from trade unions, by 1930 Taylor's system of scientific management was known and widespread in all developed countries. His idea of ​​dividing work into the simplest operations led to the creation of the assembly line, which played such a significant role in the growth of US economic power in the first half of the 20th century.

F. Taylor's works have been republished all over the world. In the USSR, his works were published in 1925 and 1931, and his methods of scientific management were studied and implemented within the framework of labor regulation and scientific organization of labor. They found their ardent supporters among the organizers of socialist construction of that time.

In conclusion, it can be noted that, despite the controversy of some of Taylor’s provisions and methods, his contribution to the development of management theory is significant. It can be admitted that he was the first to synthesize and systematize existing ideas about managing people and proposed methods thanks to which this art received its further development. And although Taylor considered the motivation of workers too simplistically and underestimated the role of the team in organizing activities (which corresponded to the degree of development of socio-psychological theory of that time), his ideas about the mutual responsibility of managers and workers, as well as his idea of ​​​​a “mental revolution” made a significant contribution to the formation new thinking in management.

According to P. Drucker, a well-known theorist in the field of management psychology, F. Taylor is one of those few people who had the greatest influence on the development of science, and whose ideas at the same time faced such stubborn misunderstanding and assiduous misinterpretation.

It can be argued that it was precisely the ambiguity of his methods and the controversial nature of some of his provisions that Taylor so excited the scientific and professional public opinion of his time that this served as a powerful impetus for the further development of management theory.

  • TaylorF.W. Shop Management. N.Y., 1903.
  • Drucker P.F. Post-capitalist society / New post-industrial wave in the West. M.: Academia, 1999. P. 87.

Frederick Taylor Born into the family of a Philadelphia lawyer. Due to a temporary vision problem that kept him from studying at Harvard University, he took a job as a worker in a small machine shop in Philadelphia. In 4 years, young Frederick mastered the professions of a model maker and mechanic (which was not easy at that time). Some time later, Taylor went to work at a steel mill. Having trained as a mechanical engineer, he quickly moved up the career ladder. A few years later, having become the manager of this enterprise, Taylor was horrified by the chaos and confusion in industrial practice: the lack of cooperation between managers and workers, inefficiency of production, wastefulness.

In 1880, Frederick Taylor began studying the labor process. Actually, Taylor was not the only one who raised the question of scientific principles of management, but he was the first person who did not accept the labor process as self-governing, but looked at it from the outside and tried to study it with the help of science.

Frederick Taylor's main achievement, recognized throughout the world, is the introduction of the scientific method, previously used in the natural sciences, into the study of labor and management.

His other contribution is less noted - the development of a method for rationally remunerating workers for the results of their work. Taylor identified the reasons for low productivity among workers.

The most important goal of a rational labor organization, from the point of view of Frederick Taylor, should be to maximize the employer's profits in combination with increasing the well-being of his employees. It was necessary to create conditions under which the employee would be interested in working faster and with better quality.

Frederick Taylor formulated basic principles of scientific organization of labor:

  1. study and classification of all actions and operations performed by employees. Finding the most effective strategies;
  2. careful selection of workers, their training by the best mentors, dismissal of all those who cannot cope;
  3. material incentives for speed and accuracy of work;
  4. cooperation between workers and management. Equal division of labor between workers and management. Everyone performs the functions that they are best at.

Frederick Taylor substantiated the need for professional selection and vocational training of workers.

Frederick Taylor's system became quite widespread in the first three decades of the 20th century. Having gained fame as “tough”, she met decisive resistance from workers and trade union organizations.

Along with the traditions of scientific management at the beginning of the 20th century. a psychotechnical tradition began to take shape. The term “psychotechnics” itself was proposed in 1903 by V. Stern. The combination " psycho" And " technique" meant any practical orientation of psychological knowledge in contrast to academic psychology. If Taylorism proceeded from the direct relationship between technology and human productivity, then psychotechnics, which arose independently of it, proposed that the improvement of labor be based on psychological laws.

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