Frederick Winslow Taylor(1856-1915)

Frederick Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 - March 21, 1915), widely known as F. W. Taylor, was an American mechanical engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency. A management consultant in his later years, he is sometimes called "the father of scientific management." He was one of the intellectual leaders of the Efficiency Movement and his ideas, broadly conceived, were highly influential in the Progressive Era.

By far the most influential person of the time and someone who has had an impact on management service practice as well as on management thought up to the present day, was F. W. Taylor. Taylor formalized the principles of scientific management, and the fact-finding approach put forward and largely adopted was a replacement for what had been the old rule of thumb.

Objectives of Scientific Management

The four objectives of management under scientific management were as follows:

• The development of a science for each element of a man's work to replace the old rule-of-thumb methods.
• The scientific selection, training and development of workers instead of allowing them to choose their own tasks and train themselves as best they could.
• The development of a spirit of hearty cooperation between workers and management to ensure that work would be carried out in accordance with scientifically devised procedures.
• The division of work between workers and the management in almost equal shares, each group taking over the work for which it is best fitted instead of the former condition in which responsibility largely rested with the workers. Self-evident in this philosophy are organizations arranged in a hierarchy, systems of abstract rules and impersonal relationships between staff.

F.W. Taylor's contribution to organizational theory

This required an organization theory similar for all practical purposes to that advocated by those organizational theorists who followed. These theorists developed principles of management, which included much of Taylor's philosophy

His framework for organization was:

• clear delineation of authority
• responsibility
• separation of planning from operations
• incentive schemes for workers
• management by exception
• task specialization

Sources:

http://www.accel-team.com/scientific/scientific_02.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Winslow_Taylor