Frederick Taylor and Using Scientific Methods for Management of Employees
In his article, “The Principles of Scientific Management, 1911”, Frederick Taylor discusses a concept he calls “soldiering” or “underworking”, referring to the ways in which some workers will purposefully work more slowly and less efficiently than they are truly able, in order to lessen their output of work (Taylor, p.4). Taylor argues that if workers would end this behavior, they could double their production, thus benefitting themselves as well as the companies that they work for (Taylor, p.5).
Since this seems to be an obvious change to make, Taylor hypothesizes three causes as to why workers would still chose to soldier, instead of choosing to increase their output to increase their wages. First, Taylor points out the common theory that increasing output will lead to more people being out of work (Taylor, p.5). Many people feel that if jobs are able to be done so efficiently, less people will be needed to perform the jobs, leading to higher unemployment rates. Second, ignorance of management as to how long it should take to perform certain tasks, allows workers to soldier (Taylor, p.7). Finally, most companies use rule-of-thumb methods to teach new employees how to perform their tasks, not considering new and possibly more efficient methods of working.
Taylor seems to believe that substituting rule-of-thumb methods with scientific methods is the only way to fix this problem of soldiering. He realizes that workers are trained by the other employees that they work with, so there are many different methods of working, with one usually being superior to the others (Taylor, p.9). This superior method can only be discovered by a strict scientific analysis of each method (Taylor, p.9).
Previously, workers commonly had the burden of figuring out the best way to do their jobs without much help from management, which means they were most likely not using scientific methods (Taylor, p.10). Taylor believes that this could be remedied by sharing more of this burden with management. Management should be doing more work, especially preparing things in order to make the workers’ jobs easier (Taylor, p.10). Also, since it is the duty of management to develop a scientific method of working for their employees, they should help their staff use the method as well as take more responsibility for the outcomes of their staff’s work (Taylor, p.10).
Taylor further asserts that under this new type of management, output of products will increase (Taylor, p.10). In addition, higher wages and closer supervision of management will result in less soldiering, as will the eventual realization that increasing output will pave the way for more jobs (Taylor, p.10).
