History of the Applied Management Theory

To make the production to go up, the managers subjected their workers to very long hours of work, paid them miserable wages, and even put them to work in undesirable conditions. In this case, it is clear that there was a huge disregard for the workers’ welfare and need (Derksen, 2014). At the beginning of the twentieth century, a lot of change was brought about through the introduction of management and scientific management. This type of management was initiated by Frederick Winslow Taylor, who majorly emphasized that the best method that could be applied so as to increase the volume of output was to have the employees specialize in particular tasks, in the same way that a particular machine could perform a specified function (Kanigel, 2005).

The implementation of his developed theory generated remarkable criticism by most scholars stipulating that the ground rules of Scientific Management were to ensure exploitation of the workers instead of benefiting them (Sonnenfeld, 1983). The productivity of these women rose at every change made. At the end, when the women were then placed right back to their initial conditions and hours, they set a productivity record. From the experiment, the Taylor's beliefs were hugely disproved in three major ways (Derksen, 2014). The first one is that the experimenters found that these women had turned into a team and that the social dynamics of the formed team exerted stronger force on the productivity than just having a ‘single best way’ to do things. Second, women tried to change their methods of work to avoid being bored, but without causing any harm to overall productivity (Nelson, 1980).

The inclusion of workers by Taylor in his scientific management domain (the precise manner through which they performed their tasks, how they coordinated together and with the machines, when, how, and how much they got paid) raised the question of whether an individual could treat workers on a par with the machines found at the shop, as Taylor seemed to do (Drever, 1929). Various psychologists including Walter Dill Scott and Hugo Münsterberg emerged and succeeded in establishing themselves as the human factor experts. The instruments of these psychologists as well as their expertise appears to be a vital complement to the psychologically faulty system developed by Taylor. The flaw was found by David Baker and Ludy Benjamin who stated that Taylor ignored 'human issues', which are psychology’s domain (Benjamin & Baker, 2004, p.

Additionally, Thomas Hughes states “'Taylor tried to systematize workers as if they were components of machines', judging him to have been 'naïve in his judgments about complex human values and motives' (Hughes, 2004, p. The Human Relations Theory and movement developed from this experiment and made the workers to perceive a completely different light; as they could now be perceived as thinking beings who possessed their personal needs, and who cherished being given attention (Jones, 1990). Corporations also realized that this attention that workers yearned for motivated them and even enabled them to give for the organization’s benefit. From the Hawthorne research, it can be concluded that the act of giving the employees attention resulted into an improvement of the performance with respect to productivity.

To support this argument, it can be stated that the group of workers who participated in the research felt that their voices were heard and they experienced a feeling of a greater personal freedom as a result. In addition, the workers felt pleased with the assistance was requested, which in turn contributed to the higher job performance (Drever, 1929). T. , & Baker, D. B. From séance to science: a history of the profession of  psychology in America. Australia; Belmont, CA: Thomson/Wadsworth. ), Hughes, T. P. American genesis: a century of invention and technological enthusiasm, 1870-1970. University of Chicago Press. Industrial psychology, (pp. The One Best Way: Frederick Winslow Taylor and the Enigma of Efficiency. New York: Viking Nelson, D. Frederick W. Taylor and the rise of scientific management.