FREDERICK W. TAYLOR
Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915) rested his philosophy on four basic principles:
1. The development of a true science of management, so that the best method for performing each task could be determined.
2. The scientific selection of workers, so that each worker would be given responsibility for the task for which he or she was best suited.
3. The scientific education and development of the worker.
4. Intimate, friendly cooperation between management and labor.

Taylor contended that the success of these principles required "a complete mental revolution" on the part of management and labor. Rather than quarrel over profits, both sides should try to increase production; by so doing, he believed, profits would rise to such an extent that labor and management would no longer have to fight over them. In short, Taylor believed that management and labor had a common interest in increasing productivity.
Taylor based his management system on production-line time studies. Instead of relying on traditional work methods, he analyzed and timed steel workers' movements on a series of jobs. Using time study as his base, he broke each job down into its components and designed the quickest and best methods of performing each component. In this way he established how much workers should be able to do with the equipment and materials at hand. He also encouraged employers to pay more productive workers at a higher rate than others, using a "scientifically correct" rate that would benefit both company and worker. Thus, workers were urged to surpass their previous performance standards to earn more pay Taylor called his plan the differential rate system.

CONTRIBUTIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY
The modem assembly line pours out finished products faster than Taylor could ever have imagined. This production "miracle" is just one legacy of scientific management. In addition, its efficiency techniques have been applied to many tasks in non-industrial organizations, ranging from fast-food service to the training of surgeons.

LIMITATIONS OF SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT THEORY
Although Taylor's method led to dramatic increases in productivity and to higher pay in a number of instances, workers and unions began to oppose his approach because they feared that working harder or faster would exhaust whatever work was available, causing layoffs.
Moreover, Taylor's system clearly meant that time was of the essence. His critics objected to the "speed up" conditions that placed undue pressures on employees to perform at faster and faster levels. The emphasis on productivity—and, by extension, profitability—led some managers to exploit both workers and customers. As a result, more workers joined unions and thus reinforced a pattern of suspicion and mistrust that shaded labor-management relations for decades
MAX WEBER
Reasoning that any goal-oriented organization consisting of thousands of individuals would require the carefully controlled regulation of its activities, the German sociologist Max Weber (1864-1920) developed a theory of bureaucratic management that stressed the need for a strictly defined hierarchy governed by clearly defined regulations and lines of authority. He considered the ideal organization to be a bureaucracy whose activities and objectives were rationally thought out and whose divisions of labor were explicitly spelled out. Weber also believed that technical competence should be emphasized and that performance evaluations should be made entirely on the basis of merit.
Today we often think of bureaucracies as vast, impersonal organizations that put impersonal efficiency ahead of human needs. We should be careful, though, not to apply our negative connotations of the word bureaucracy to the term as Weber use it. Like the scientific management theorists, Weber sought to improve the performance of socially important organizations by making their operations predictable and productive. Although we now value innovation and flexibility as much as efficiency and predictability, Weber's model of bureaucratic management clearly advanced the formation of huge corporations such as Ford. Bureaucracy was a particular pattern of relationships for which Weber saw great promise.
Although bureaucracy has been successful for many companies, in the competitive global market of the 1990s organizations such as General Electric and Xerox have become "bureaucracy busters," throwing away the organization chart and replacing it with ever-changing constellations of teams, projects, and alliances with the goal of unleashing employee creativity.
THE HUMAN RELATIONS MOVEMENT
Human relations is frequently used as a general term to describe the ways in which managers interact with their employees. When "employee management" stimulates more and better work, the organization has effective human relations; when morale and efficiency deteriorate, its human relations are said to be ineffective. The human relations movement arose from early attempts to systematically discover the social and psychological factors that would create effective human relations.
THE HAWTHORNE EXPERIMENTS. The human relations movement grew out of a famous series of studies conducted at the Western Electric Company from 1924 to 1933. These eventually became known as the "Hawthorne Studies" because many of them were performed at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant near Chicago. The Hawthorne Studies began as an attempt to investigate the relationship between the level of lighting in the workplace and worker productivity--the type of question Frederick Taylor and his colleagues might well have addressed.
In some of the early studies, the Western Electric researchers divided the employees into test groups, who were subjected to deliberate changes in lighting, and control groups, whose lighting remained constant throughout the experiments. The results of the experiments were ambiguous. When the test group's lighting was improved, productivity tended to increase, although erratically. But when lighting conditions were made worse, there was also a tendency for productivity to increase in the test group. To compound the mystery, the control group's output also rose over the course of the studies, even though it experienced no changes in illumination. Obviously, something besides lighting was influencing the workers' performance.
In a new set of experiments, a small group of workers was placed in a separate room and a number of variables were altered: Wages were increased; rest periods of varying length were introduced; the workday and work week were shortened. The researchers, who now acted as supervisors, also allowed the groups to choose their own rest periods and to have a say in other suggested changes. Again, the results were ambiguous. Performance tended to increase over time, but it also rose and fell erratically. Partway through this set of experiments, Elton Mayo (1880-1949) and some associates from Harvard, including Fritz J. Roethhsberger and William J. Dickson, became involved.
In these and subsequent experiments, Mayo and his associates decided that a complex chain of attitudes had touched off the productivity increases. Because they had been singled out for special attention, both the test and the control groups had developed a group pride that motivated them to improve their work performance. Sympathetic supervision had further reinforced their motivation. The researchers concluded that employees would work harder if they believed management was concerned about their welfare and supervisors paid special attention to them. This phenomenon was subsequently labeled the Hawthorne Effect, since the control group received no special supervisory treatment or enhancement of working conditions but still improved its performance, some people (including Mayo himself) speculated that the control group's productivity gains resulted from the special attention of the researchers themselves.
The researchers also concluded that informal work groups--the social environment of employees--have a positive influence on productivity. Many of Western Electric’s employees found their work dull and meaningless, but their associations and friendships with co-workers, sometimes influenced by a shared antagonism toward the "bosses," imparted some meaning to their working lives and provided some protection from management. For these reasons, group pressure was frequently a stronger influence on worker productivity than management demands.
To Mayo, then, the concept of "social man"--motivated by social needs, wanting rewarding on-the-job relationships, and responding more to work-group pressures than to management control--vas necessary to complement the old concept of "rational man" motivated by personal economic needs. All these findings might unremarkable today. But compare what Mayo and his associates considered relevant with what Ford and Weber found relevant, and you see what a change these ideas brought to management theory.

APPLYING QUALITY CONCEPTS TO HUMAN RELATIONS THEORIES
The application of these human relations theories can be seen in today's competitive environment. For example, with the restructuring of today's competitive global economy, many companies have made the decision to "downsize" or reduce the numbers of managers and workers. However, some companies, well aware of the dynamics pointed out by the Hawthorne studies, have approached employee reductions with great care. At Sky Chiefs, a $450 million airline in-flight services corporation, the problems experienced by the airlines industry such as price wars, brisk competition from foreign airlines, aging fleets, and the increasing cost of new planes, were directly affecting the company. Forced to reduce staff, management realized that if it managed the process poorly and didn't take into consideration the needs of employees, those who remained after the downsizing would be less loyal and cohesive as a group.
To minimize potential problems after the downsizing, the management adopted "total quality leadership" to provide the company with a framework for implementing the restructuring. It spent thousands of hours and dollars to fund training and improvement processes related to total quality leadership. The key to the success of the restructuring was that instead of management dictating what would happen and to whom, employees, seen as the backbone of the company, were empowered to facilitate the process. For example, prior to the restructuring process, employees participated in evaluating all headquarters functions. An employee-managed restructuring committee was selected by management to assemble, interpret, and evaluate the data. Then smaller action teams were created to address the downsizing. To help those who were to be let go, extensive counselling and outplacement services were provided, including group workshops on networking, interviewing techniques, and hiring, and employees were videotaped to help with future interviews.
Now, after the restructuring, productivity and operating profits are increasing. The remaining employees have accepted their new roles and responsibilities, and morale continues to improve
SUMMARY
Mayo believed that industrialization and destruction of craft systems had caused social disintegration and normless, maladjusted behaviour. In the past, men had lived in communities where their work was a part of communal life and their morale and amusements derived from a sense of solidarity among themselves and service to the community. But today, men drift with no plans, go where work takes them, and must live in a society with an unstable economy. Because communal life outside work is neglected, it becomes urgently needed within the workplace; the need raises the requisites of working together; cooperation and collaboration (Trahair, 1984: 254).
But at work, the worker-management adversarial relationship stemmed from workers' misunderstanding and distrust of management. Management contributed to this situation by being more concerned with economic efficiency than with social solidarity, thereby driving alienated workers to seek asylum in informal work groups. These groups were then used to undermine management. Mayo's prognosis was twofold -- management should acquire social skills, and use them to secure workers' cooperation. The primary vehicle to its achievement is informal groups. Thus, nurturing supervisors can adjust workers to bureaucratic life by facilitating the creation of informal work groups, and then taking control over them. Eventually, if properly done, management should be able to align workers' interests with management's. Workers would become convinced that managers were on their side, and that organizational bureaucracies were communities of producers. This should result in workers having a sense of participation, a feeling of release from constraint, and a desire to advance the organization's (i.e., management's) interests. But specialized jobs and existing power structures would remain intact. Workers would participate only in marginal decisions, in choosing such things as the colors of restroom walls, not in any strategic decisions.
In other words, little emphasis was placed on problem solving and the process improvements that play such an important role today. Perhaps because of its limited and manipulative objectives, the human relations movement waned in the 1950s. Although Mayo's contribution had had a pervasive effect on managerial ideology, it's effect on managerial practices was rather limited.