Name: Steven P Sanderson II

Date: 6/30/06
Class: Intro to Business BA11 5040
Professor: McNamara

In this reaction paper I will be talking about scientific management and the need
for motivation. Some companies such as shipping and manufacturing companies like
UPS and Ford Motor Co. use scientific management. Scientific management is when a
company studies workers to find the most efficient ways of doing things and then
teaching people those methods. Frederick Taylor is known as the father of scientific
management. Frederick wrote a book entitled The Principals of Scientific Management.
Frederick lived from March 20, 1865 – March 21, 1915 and was an intellectual part of the
efficiency movement and his ideas, broadly conceived were highly influential in the
progressive era. The progressive era was a period which lasted from the 1890’s through
the 1920’s. Although some experts use a narrower from 1900 – 1917 the reformers
advocated the aforementioned efficiency movement.

In 1874 Frederick became an apprentice machinist learning of factory conditions

at the grassroots level, He earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering through a highly
unusual method for the time, through correspondence through Stevens Institute of
Technology. Taylor thought that by scientifically analyzing work he would be able to
find the most efficient method possible through time and motion studies. Taylor believed
that contemporary management was amateurish and should be studied as a discipline and
that workers should cooperate with management thus no need for trade unions and that
best results would come from the partnership between skilled workers and management.
Clearly this seems to be the way things are going on in today’s economy as we move
from manufacturing to service.

Today union membership is declining and workers are becoming more educated
and management and workers are working better together today and companies are
becoming more efficient. Taylor was president of the ASME and tried to instill his
principles their and failed, not surprisingly though. Scientific management may be
efficient but no one wants to be a machine which seems to me clearly what Taylor
thought people should act like in any corporation. Taylor was only president of the
ASME from 1906 – 1907. In 1912 Taylor collected his articles and put them together for
a book, he submitted it to the ASME for publication where he was turned down so he
published Principals elsewhere without ASME approval.

One company today that uses scientific management and uses it will is UPS. UPS
has gone so far as to actually tell their employees how fast to walk, how to stop out of
their truck, how to fold money and how to hold their keys. Now you may ask yourself,
why in the world would anyone want to work for a company that tells you how to
basically breathe? The answer to this is motivation, but what kind of motivation could
possibly get people to work under such conditions? Well first we must understand what
motivation is. Through www.wikipedia.org motivation is defined in the following
manner. In psychology motivation refers to the initiation, direction, intensity and
dynamic state that should not be confused personality or emotion. Motivation is having
the encouragement to do something.

Some types of encouragement would be intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards.

Intrinsic rewards are the personal satisfaction you feel when you perform well and
complete goals. Extrinsic rewards are something given to you by someone else as
recognition for good work; extrinsic rewards include pay increases, praise and promotion.
UPS drivers that were mentioned earlier enjoy some very generous extrinsic rewards.
Not only do they enjoy some very handsome wages but also take part in generous
benefits a profit sharing plan and high amounts of praise. As I stated earlier people are
not machines and cannot be treated as machines. This is evident from anxiety, phobias or
back strain that many drivers from UPS have and still suffer from. At one point UPS had
2x the amount of injuries as their competitors and have since settled a $3 million fine
with government agencies. To remedy this UPS has invested about $1.5 billion to
improve working conditions for employees.

Now with all of this said I believe scientific management can be applied but only
to a certain degree. Companies with humans working for them can only become so
efficient before they start coming down the other end of the efficiency parabola.