Scientific Management Trends

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Introduction
Today’s business environment is increasingly global and competitive, the influence of organizational behavior, the efficient human management and the nature of relationship between people organization. This essay studies the changes in the business environment since the past one hundred years and how the organizations have responded to the identified challenges because of the changes that occurred. Moreover, it explains how the attitude of the consumers towards the workplace has changed in relation to their expectations, motivation and job satisfaction. Then this essay will identify the current changes and trends adopted by the organization in order to manage the people and the importance of a manager to understand the perception
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However the most important and obvious developments of management theory grew in the 20th century. With a background in mechanical engineering, a great number of classical writers focused on improvement of management in order to improve productivity. Scientific management, one of subgroups of classical approach, was proposed by F. W. Taylor in "The Principles of Scientific Management" (Taylor, 1947). Taylor (1967) believed that all employees would be motivated by money through working and producing efficiently and using scientific means can analyze and allocate all work processes into independent task. He summarized a number of principles to guide management, including using the scientific method to study work and determine the most efficient way to perform specific tasks, the scientific selection, training and development of workers, monitoring and instructing workers’ performance to ensure that work is carried out in the prescribed way and allocating work and responsible between management and the workers. His implementation of this theory brought about tremendous criticism by the masses arguing that the fundamentals of Scientific Management were to exploit employees rather than to benefit them (Mullins, …show more content…
During the 1920s, the years of great depression, people pay more attention to social factors and behavior of employees at work like human relation theory rather than structure and the formal organization like classical management theory (Mullins, 2011). As huge turning point in the development of human relation theory, the Hawthorne experiment were conducted and proved the key role of human resource in increasing production of an organization. (Roethlisberger, Dickson, Wright and Pforzheimer, 1939). Elton Mayo (1945) who wrote about the Hawthorne experiments discovered that workers’ behavior is determined by a complex set of attributes. There are informal groups in the organization which could be much stronger than financial incentives as a motivator. The workplace is a close knit social system and not just a production system. However, the human relation theory has been criticized because of adoption of a management perspective, oversimplified frame, ignoring the role of organization in social operation (Silverman, 1971).
After the hundred years of modern management, the organizations are currently adopting theories like X and Y theory, hierarchy of needs and contingency theory. According to Capozza, Brown, Aharpour and Falvo (2006), X and Y theory is a management theory

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