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Scientific management

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Scientific management
Scientific management
Introduction
Nowadays, scientific management plays an important role in our workplaces. Nevertheless, to draw a conclusion that whether scientific management is appropriate in nowadays workplaces, the essay will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of scientific management. First of all, as to the definition of management, the answer to this problem varies from people to people. Some people like Frederick Winslow Taylor, thought that management is a discipline that involves the calm and systematic tasks of planning, organizing, leading, and controlling. Maybe, from this point of view, we can basically understand what the managers do. However, others such as Jaffee have questioned whether scientific management is really just a system for controlling workers. In order to analyze the scientific management comprehensively, following will compare the past scientific management with nowadays’ and discuss the impact of scientific management in effective management and worker motivation.
Managerial work
Firstly, as to the roles of manager, as it is known, managers’ plan, organize, coordinate, control when they are working. However, what kinds of job can be called planning, organizing, coordinating and controlling (Mintzberg 1971, p. 97)? For example, as a manager enters the office in the morning, he faces a lot of work. He answers the telephone, meets his colleagues, sends the e-mails and attends the meeting. It shows that it is difficult to use these words to describe what the managers actually do in their daily work.
In fact, even though many managers have their normal working hours, the managerial work seems to be very taxing. They maybe need to process scores of mails each single day, attend several meetings and call several people. Since they are so busy, their free time is very rare. If the manager want to enjoy their rare break time, their subordinate maybe show up to catch the available time (Wilson, 2004). These show that the



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