The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) is a monograph published by Frederick Winslow Taylor. This laid out Taylor’s views on principles of scientific management, or industrial era organization and decision theory. Taylor was an American manufacturing manager, mechanical engineer, and then a management consultant in his later years. The term “scientific management” refers to coordinating the enterprise for everyone’s benefit including increased wages for laborers
[1] although the approach is “directly antagonistic to the old idea that each workman can best regulate his own way of doing the work.
“[2] His approach is also often referred to as Taylor’s Principles, or Taylorism.
aylor argued that the principle object of management should be to secure the maximum prosperity for the employer, coupled with the maximum prosperity for each employee. He argued that the most important object of both the employee and the management should be the training and development of each individual in the establishment, so that he can do the highest class of work for which his natural abilities fit him. Taylor demonstrated that maximum prosperity can exist only as the result of maximum productivity, both for the shop and individual, and rebuked the idea that the fundamental interests of employees and employers are necessarily antagonistic.
Taylor described how workers deliberately work slowly, or “soldier”, to protect their interests. According to Taylor, there were three reasons for the inefficiency:
First. The fallacy, which has from time immemorial been almost universal among workmen, that a material increase in the output of each man or each machine in the trade would result in the end in throwing a large number of men out of work.
Second. The defective systems of management which are in common use, and which make it necessary for each workman to soldier, or work slowly, in order that he may protect his own best interests.
Third. The inefficient rule-of-thumb methods, which are still almost universal in all trades, and in practicing which our workmen waste a large part of their effort.