FREDERICK TAYLOR: BIOGRAPHY, THEORY AND CONTRIBUTIONS - CULTURE VOCABULARY - 2025

Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) was an American engineer and inventor, considered the father of scientific management, and whose contributions were fundamental to the development of the industry at the beginning of the 20th century.

His most important work, The Principles of Scientific Management, was published in 1911 and despite the social and technological changes that have occurred since that time, many of his ideas are still valid or have been the basis for the development of new contributions.

Biography

Frederick Winslow Taylor was born on March 20, 1856 in Pennsylvania, in the town of Germantown. His family had a good economic position, which was positive for his education, since he was able to attend university.

Visual problem

Taylor began studying law at Phillips Exeter Academy, located in New Hampshire. Later she passed the exam to enter Harvard; However, she had to abandon her training as a result of a serious illness that affected her sight.

It is said that he began to suffer from this vision condition when he was a teenager. During this stage of his life he also presented a body with a weak composition; This influenced him not being able to participate in the sports activities of which his colleagues were part.

Based on this characteristic that, in some way, disabled him, Taylor began to reflect on the options that could exist to improve the physical response of athletes through the improvement of the instruments and tools that they used.

These first conceptions formed the basis on which he later sustained his entire way of thinking, linked to the location of strategies through which it was possible to increase production in the most efficient way possible.

Laboral life

In 1875 Frederick Taylor had a vision already recovered. At that time he joined an industrial steel company located in Philadelphia where he worked as a laborer.

Three years later, in 1878, he worked at the Midvale Steel Company in Utah, United States. Very quickly, he rose within the company, working as machinist, group leader, foreman, chief foreman, and director of the plans office, until he became chief engineer.

Time study

In 1881, when Frederick Taylor was 25 years old, he began introducing the concept of time study to the Midvale Steel Company.

Frederick was characterized from a young age by being extremely observant and thorough. In the steel company he observed with great attention and detail how the men in charge of cutting the metallic materials worked.

He focused a lot on paying attention to how they carried out each step of that process. As a consequence of this observation, he conceived the notion of breaking work down into simple steps in order to better analyze it.

In addition, it was important to Taylor that these steps had a specific and strict execution time, and that the workers adhere to those times.

In 1883, Taylor obtained the title of mechanical engineer from the Stevens Institute of Technology, training that he carried out studying at night, since at that time he was already working in the steel company.

It was in that year that he became chief engineer for the Midvale Steel Company, and at this time he designed and built a new machine shop to increase productivity efficiently.

Scientific organization of work

Very soon the notions of Frederick Taylor based on close observation led to the birth of a new conception of work, and it was what later became known as the scientific organization of work.

As part of this search, Taylor left his job in Midvale and joined the Manufacturing Investment Company, where he worked for 3 years and where he developed an engineering approach more geared towards management consulting.

This new vision opened many job doors, and Taylor was part of various business ventures. The last company he worked for was the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, where he continued to develop novel processes to optimize, in this case related to the handling of cast iron and the action of shoveling.

Retirement and acknowledgments

When he was 45 years old, Taylor decided to retire from the workplace, but continued to give talks and lectures at various colleges and universities, with the intention of promoting the principles of scientific labor management.

Taylor and his wife had adopted three children, and during the decade from 1904 to 1914, they all lived in Philadelphia.

Taylor received many accolades throughout his life. In 1906 the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) named him president; in that same year he received the appointment of doctor honoris causa in the field of sciences by the University of Pennsylvania.

One of his most emblematic participations took place in 1912, when he was presented before a special committee of the Congress of the United States of America, with the intention of exposing the characteristics of the machinery management system that he had created.

Death

Frederick Taylor died on March 21, 1915 in Philadelphia at the age of 59. Until the day of his death, he continued to publicize his system of scientific organization of work in various academic and professional settings.

Scientific management theory

Frederick Taylor's theory of scientific management is specifically based on generating a system through which both the employer and the employee can have the possibility of receiving the greatest amount of benefit and prosperity as possible.

To achieve this, the administration must ensure that its employees have constant and quality training, so that they are better and better in their work, which results in a better result in production.

In addition, part of Taylor's arguments focused on the fact that the skills of each employee must be adjusted to the activity for which they are hired, and continuous training will allow these skills to get better and better.

In the time that Taylor lived, the most common conception was that the goals of employees and employers could not coincide. However, Taylor states that this is not the case, since it is possible to guide both groups towards the same goal, which is high and efficient productivity.

Main defects of the systems

Taylor expressed that there were errors that were widespread in the industries of his time, and that they had to be corrected immediately to generate a better and more efficient productivity. These were:

-The administration had a performance that was considered deficient. Through its mismanagement, it encouraged employee downtime, which generated a deficit in the production level.

-Many methods used in the processes were very defective and useless, and only promoted the exhaustion of the worker, which ended up throwing away the effort put in place.

-The management was not familiar with the company's own processes. Management had no idea what the specific activities were carried out, or how long it took to carry out those tasks.

-The working methods were not uniform, which made the whole process very inefficient.

Principles of scientific labor administration

As Taylor explained, the notion of scientific labor management is characterized by being based on four fundamental principles. Below we will describe the most relevant characteristics of each of these:

Scientific organization of work

This concept is directly linked to the action of those who perform administrative tasks. They are the ones who must change inefficient methods and guarantee that workers will meet the stipulated times for carrying out each activity.

In order to carry out an adequate management and with that scientific character that Taylor introduces, it is necessary to consider what are the times associated with each activity, what are the delays, why they are generated and what specific movements the workers must make to correctly comply with each homework.

In addition, it is also necessary to know what operations are carried out, the tools that are fundamental for the execution of the tasks and who are the people responsible for each of the processes associated with production.

Choice of worker and training

Frederick Taylor emphasized that each worker should be chosen taking into account their specific abilities.

In this way, the work can be done in a more efficient and better finished way, and the worker will feel well-being knowing that he is capable of carrying out the task for which he has been assigned.

Being able to make a more precise selection is the consequence of reflecting in a methodical and analytical way what is the nature of each task, and what are the elements that compose it.

By being able to reel off the characteristics of a process to the maximum, it is possible to clearly identify what are the necessary capacities in an operator to carry out the task in the best possible way.

Cooperation

Taylor indicates that it is essential that the workers, who are the ones who ultimately operate the system, pursue the same objective as the managers; an increase in production and efficiency.

For this, Taylor argues that the remuneration given to workers must be related to production. In other words, it proposes that remuneration be increased based on the number of tasks performed or items produced; in this way, whoever generates more will earn more.

It also indicates that this is a way to avoid job simulation, because employees will seek to behave in the most efficient way possible in order to generate higher income.

In his research, Taylor observed that if a worker noticed that he earned the same, regardless of his level of production, he was not going to strive to improve his performance; on the contrary, he would find a way to do less so as not to make vain efforts.

Three concrete actions

According to Taylor, this cooperation is achieved based on three very specific actions. The first of these is that the payment to each operator is per unit of work performed. The second action is that a coordinating group of operators must be organized.

These coordinators or foremen must know in depth the activities carried out by the operators, so that they have the moral authority to give them orders, and at the same time they can instruct them and teach them more about the specific work.

In this way, the constant training of operators is promoted by the same people who coordinate them in their regular tasks.

In the same way, in the context of the methodical and meticulous examination of each process, it is necessary for these foremen to attend to very specific areas in the production chain, so that they can take charge of the coordination of certain elements. In the long run, this will lead to a much more efficient production system.

Division of labor between managers and operators

Finally, for Taylor it is essential that the workload of managers and workers is equal. In other words, the aim is for there to be a fair and coherent division of labor, all always in order to achieve maximum efficiency in all processes.

In the case of the administration, this must be in charge of all the elements that have to do with the analysis of situations, the generation of plans that are linked to the future of the company, as well as the strategies to follow to achieve greater benefits.

Instead, the operators must be in charge of manual work, which implies the production as such of the elements associated with the company. Although the natures of both tasks are different, both are very relevant in the entire process, and must be assumed with responsibility and commitment.

Main contributions

Taylor was the first to propose a scientific approach to work

His experience as an operator and shop manager allowed him to discover that the workers were not as productive as they could be and this diminished the performance of the company.

So he proposed a scientific approach: observe the way they worked to discover which actions were delaying work the most and reorganize activities in the most productive way.

For example, if in a garment factory each worker is responsible for the manufacture of a garment from start to finish, a lot of time would be wasted in changing tasks and tools.

Instead, if activities are organized so that one worker cuts all the garments and another sews them, it is possible to reduce manufacturing time and increase the profits of the company.

Raised the need to plan work

Nowadays it seems obvious that before carrying out a task we must plan what the steps will be to carry it out. However it was not always so.

Taylor was the first to estimate that to create any product in less time, it was necessary to plan the steps to follow and the responsibilities of all participants within that process.

Established the need to monitor work to confirm that it was done correctly

Taylor observed that in industries, managers often did not know how their products were made and left the entire process in the hands of the employees.

For this reason, one of the principles of his scientific approach was for managers to observe and learn from all the processes of their company in order to plan and control them, ensuring that they were being carried out in the most efficient way.

Introduced the idea of ​​selecting staff

In those factories, it was customary for all workers to know how to do everything and to not be experts in anything specific, which caused many mistakes to be made.

Taylor observed that all workers had different skills, so it was necessary to assign them a single activity that they could perform very well rather than many tasks that they did mediocre.

This practice is still maintained and is the reason for the existence of the Human Resources departments in companies.

Promoted the specialization of workers

As already mentioned, one of the principles of Taylor's scientific approach was to select employees according to their abilities to carry out a certain activity.

This fact implied that both employees and administrators were trained in specific tasks to be attractive to companies, a practice that continues to this day.

It gave greater prestige to the role of administrators

Before Taylor, managers had no role in job performance and left all responsibility with the operators.

It was thanks to ideas such as activity planning, work control, and personnel selection that the fundamental responsibilities that managers carry out to this day began to develop.

Contributed to the growth and development of management faculties

At that time, business management was not known as a prestigious profession. However, with Taylor's scientific approach, this activity was taken more seriously and began to be seen as a respected profession valued by industries.

Thanks to this phenomenon, administrative faculties multiplied in the United States and later throughout the world, and even a new discipline was created: industrial engineering.

He was the first to highlight the role of the worker

In Taylor's day, machines and factories were still a recent invention and were thought to be the stars of the job because they had made production easier and faster.

That is why the idea that productivity also depended on employees was a novelty and it was necessary to train, evaluate and motivate them to give their maximum at work.

Not only does this approach hold true, it is the foundation of disciplines such as organizational psychology and personnel management.

He wanted to reconcile the role of managers with that of workers

During his observations, Taylor noted that operators were not motivated to do their best at work because, according to him, they did not feel that it was in their favor.

So one of his ideas was for industries to provide incentives to those who were most productive to show that when companies were successful, employees also received benefits.

His ideas went beyond the business field

After the publication of The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor's ideas began to be observed from outside the industry as well.

Universities, social organizations and even housewives began to analyze how they could apply principles such as planning, control and specialization within their daily activities to achieve greater efficiency in them.

All of Taylor's ideas have been criticized and reformulated by experts in different disciplines throughout the more than one hundred years that have passed since his death.

It is criticized that the interest in efficiency leaves aside the interest in the human being, that excessive specialization makes it difficult to find a job and that not all companies can be managed according to the same formulas.

However, his name remains fundamental because he was the first to ask key questions : How to make companies more productive? How to organize work? How to make the most of employee talent? get them to work with motivation?

References

1. Nelson, D. (1992). Scientific Management in retrospect. In: A mental revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. 249 pages. Recovered from: hiostatepress.org.
2. Nelson, D. (1992). Scientific Management and the Transformation of University Business Education. In: A mental revolution: Scientific Management since Taylor. Ohio: Ohio State University Press. 249 pages. Recovered from: ohiostatepress.org.
3. Taylor, F. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper & brothers publishers. Recovered from: saasoft.com.
4. Turan, H. (2015). Taylor's "Scientific Management Principles": Contemporary Issues in Personnel Selection Period. Journal of Economics, Business and Management. 3 (11). P, 1102-1105. Recovered from: joebm.com.
5. Uddin, N. (2015). Evolution of modern management through Taylorism: An adjustment of Scientific Management comprising behavioral science. In: Procedia Computer Science 62. Pages 578 - 584. Recovered from: sciencedirect.com.
6. Wren, D. (2011). The Centennial of Frederick W. Taylor's The Principles of Scientific Management: A Retrospective Commentary. In: Journal of Business and Management. 17 (1). Pages 11-22. chapman.edu.