ABSTRACT

The essay revolves around the central question: Are the scientific and human relationsmanagement still applicable to
organizations in the 21
st
century? The key issues consist of:

-The theory about scientific and human relations approaches
-Management in the 21
st
Century
-The applicability of the two approaches in the new context


INTRODUCTION

Management, a process of getting things done, effectively and efficiently with and throughother people,
has been practiced since a long time ago. Its long history can be traced back to over 3000 years ago with
the Egyptian pyramids as the proof that projects of tremendousscope, employing tens of thousands of
people were completed in ancient times. From the1780s to mid 1800s, the birth of corporation came and
brought significant influences onmanagement, making it become a necessary component to ensure the
success of the business. However, only around the beginning of 20th century, the knowledge
of management was actually unified, developed and taught in a variety of settings. Thoseearly proponents
were called classical approaches. Since then, many other approaches were proposed and a considerable
number of contributions were made to management theory.Among them there are two approaches:
Scientific management and human relationsmanagement. These represent two different schools of
management: One belongs to theclassical theorists, focuses on efficiency and brings unquestionable
changes to task performance and structure of the organization while the other is a contemporary
approachthat considers human factors as the center of organizations. In this essay, I shall present
myunderstanding of the two approaches, which I absorbed from various readings, relate thetheory to a
real-life example and answer the research question: Are scientific and humanrelations management
still applicable to organizations in the 21st century?

I. SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT:
1. Definition:
Scientific management is based on the work of the US engineer Frederick Winslow
Taylor (1856-1915) who in his 1911 book The Principles Of Scientific Management laid
down the fundamental principles of large-scale manufacturing through assembly-line
factories. It emphasizes rationalization and standardization of work through division of
labor, time and motion studies, work measurement, and piece-rate wages.
1


2. Principles of SM:
a. Scientific Management replace the tradition and rules of thumb work methods by
a scientific study of an individual at work.

b. Selection, training and develop each worker rather than leaving them to train
themselves.

c. Cooperation with the workers to ensure work methods being followed.

d. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers.

3. Strengths and Weaknesses
Strengths
Spender, J.C and Kijne (1996)
2
listed some strengths of SM.

- One of the first formal divisions between employers and workers.
- Improve production methods, leading to a major global increase of living
standards.
- Focus on the individual task and worker level was focused, laying the ground
for Business Process Reengineering (process level) theory.
- Direct reward mechanism for workers rather than pointless end-of-year
profitsharing schemes.
- Suggest schemes for workers, who should be rewarded by cash premiums.
- The systemization is the early proponent of today quality standard theory.
- Emphasize on measuring. Measurement enables improvement.

Weaknesses
The authors also showed the limitations of SM.
- Taylorism can be easily abused to exploit human beings and create conflicts with
labor unions.
- Not useful to deal with groups or teams.
- Leave no room for individual preferences or initiative.
- Overemphasis on measuring and pay no attention to soft factors, led to
deskillinglabor.
- The work is too repetitive and workers feel like being treated as machines.



1
Definition of Scientific Management: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/scientific-
management.html#ixzz1rQQJGjur

2
Spender, J.C. and Hijne, H. (Eds), 1996, Scientific Managemet: Fredrick Winslow Taylors Gift to the world ?
4. Companies and corporations applied Scientific Management
- Midvale Steel, Ford, Starbuck, Mc Donald, IBM
Exp.: Starbuck applied SM
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT: It is concerned with improving the performance
of individualworker and finding the best way to do particular task.Starbucks
coffee producing department is the place where scientific management theory
canbe applicable where they can divide and distribute jobs and find out the best
way of performingtasks in order to improve production efficiency