Taylorism or Scientific Management – Using Science to Improve Efficiency

Taylorism (Scientific Management)

Taylorism is another name for the concept of “Scientific Management”, which was developed by Frederick Winslow Taylor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The core of this concept is, as the name suggests, that a scientific approach can be taken to the work organizations do so to improve productivity and efficiency.

Taylor was born in Pennsylvania in the 1850s and worked in a range of factories and industries. He had a strong interest in engineering, mechanics and machines and a lot of his insights into management stem from this lens of seeing the world. This mechanistic view of the world led him to believe that there was a systematic way to improve the performance of organizations, just as there is a systematic way to improve the functioning of a mechanical machine. 

Scientific management reshaped the organizational landscape. Though Taylor died in 1915, his views and the ideas he introduced continue to influence our core thoughts about workplaces to this day.

Four Core Principles

The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, laid out Taylor’s core thinking. In it, he proposed four principles:

1. The development of a true science of work,
2. The scientific selection and training of workers,
3. The bringing together of scientifically selected workers and scientifically developed methods, and
4. The division of labor between managers and workers.

His theory was that by doing these things it would be possible to enhance efficiency in organizations by helping them find the “one best way” of doing things. To find this “one best way” organizations would deeply analyse their processes (though something like a time and motion study), break the work their people and machines did down into constituent building blocks or tasks, standardise them and then fit them together into the most effective overall combined production process.

Taylor very much saw the role of managers as being to shape and improve how things are done in the quest for the “one best way”, and the role of workers being to do as best they could what they had been trained to do as defined by the current “one best way”. In this way, workers could become highly specialised in the specific task that they had to do, much like Adam Smith’s pin makers. Taylor also suggested that workers be compensated based on productivity to incentivise higher output.

The way we think as humans is fascinating. Cognitive biases clearly explain some of our “irrationality”. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is just one example of this. Understanding our Dual Process way of thinking provides some further insight into it. This “irrationality” means that we’re all suggestible and susceptible to nudging and the powers of choice architecture and persuasion.

Communication is another tool often used to change people’s behaviors. Ideas like the rhetorical triangle and the five canons of rhetoric shed some light on how this works. For a more detailed look at communicating for persuasion, explore Monroe’s Motivated Sequence.

Increasingly, products are also design to be persuasive, as it were. They are designed to create habits and drive increased use. Examples of this include Fogg’s model and the Hook model of behavioral design.

You can listen to our podcast, below, on nudging to learn more about how our behaviors can be influenced:

Taylors work has hugely influenced many organizations and even society. The efficiencies and interconnected way of thinking about the processes of production, particularly in manufacturing, that the model introduced effectively enabled the world of mass production that we now live in. What a great contribution this is.

In fact, the very way of thinking that Taylor brought to our organizations still exists in much of the language and metaphors that we use when thinking about work. We’d argue that these sit behind our conscious though and share our senses as to what is right in an organization, without us being consciously aware that this is even happening.

Examples of metaphors like this include: “A cog in the machine”, “A well oiled Machine”, “working like clockwork”, “let’s pull the lever on it”, “we have a bottleneck”, “time to push the button”. We’re sure there are many more, but you get the idea.

One of the problems we (and many others) see with this way of viewing the world, particularly when we do it unconsciously, is that it treats people as interchangeable parts of a machine, which is de humanizing (human capital etc). While there are some moral issues with that, which you can make your own views on, there are also some operational issues.

A lot of the work that Taylor did focused on essentially mechanistic issues where human input was physical. In the modern workplace, much human contribution is non physical taking the form of “knowledge” work, or emotional work or similar. There is a strong view that people are not able to do this work to a high standard, if they are being treated like machines. In part, it is this shift in the ways that people work that has lead to the increased focus on things like “human focused management”. 

There are loads of things you can read about the history of management theory and critiques of these theories. The core source for Taylorism is: Taylor, F. W. (1911). The Principles of Scientific Management. Harper & Brothers. This is the seminal work where Taylor outlines the principles of Scientific Management.

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