Critical Review of Scientific Management in Contemporary Organisations

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Management is when different individuals come together in an organization to work and achieve a common organizational goal. Managers would manage employees in a way that enhances productivity by efficiently and effectively.

In 1918, Taylor known as the "Father of Scientific Management" published his book ' The Principals of Scientific Management, in which he described how the scientific approach improves productivity.

Prior to the scientific management there were skilled craftsman who learnt their work by lengthy studies. Therefore they made their own decisions about how their job was to be performed.

Scientific management took away much of these autonomy and pressures employees to be specialized on a particular piece of work and therefore increases the productivity.

Scientific management is mainly developed based on following four principals.

• Scientifically designing tasks.
• Scientific selection and development of personnel.
• Management - worker cooperation.
• Equal division of work.

Even though scientific management has lots of criticisms regard to the contemporary organizations, Japanese car manufacturers like Honda and Nissan still been use the very ideology with the approach KAIZEN in order to better utilize materials and reduce costs.

Scientific management supported the idea of autocratic leadership, therefore a higher possibility for work floor conflicts, which could be result a slump in the productivity and be negatively impact the organization as large.Therefore organizations today are more in to developed closer relationship between mangers and workers for a better out put. For  an example Virgin let their line managers to identify work floor trends and enabled them  to implement the concept of flexible working hours for a better work floor environment.

Conclusion

Since scientific management scientifically design tasks, there could be negative implications relating to the contemporary unstable environment, where customized and mass productions are welcome. Moreover innovation and creativity is not possible and inflexible, fixed wage rate is not effective for all situations as during economic rescission's wage rage is needed to be adjusted. 

Scientific management is still the father of modern business. Basically criticisms are with the careful application but not the theory itself. If the theory is applied correctly at the right time and the right way still that could be expect better results and if its otherwise wise versa.

Reference.

• www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/
• www.managementstudyguide.com/
• www.sciencedirect.com/science