Frederic Winslow Taylor

Frederic Winslow Taylor (March 20, 1856 - March 21, 1915)


Frederic W. Taylor was a American mechanical engineer. The things that make us talk about him even today are his studies on 'application of the scientific method to the management of workers'.

He started his carrier as a simple worker in a company named 'Midvale' in 1878. After sixteen years of work, he promoted to chief engineering. Taylor observed gross inefficiencies during his contact with steel workers in this period. We can say that Taylor became interested in improving worker productivity by these contacts with steel workers. He realized about couple of things that decrease poductivity. If we want to list them;

- He saw that employees were relying on rule-of-thumb methods and these methods introduce them to extra and unnecessary work.

- Employees were not using their all capacity. Because in their thinking, it was going to increase productivity and the factories was not going to need some of them just because of that extra-productivity.

- The employees were afraid of increasing the standard of working pace. So, employees take great care never to work at a good pace.


Seeing these, Taylor began to conduct experiments to determine what was necessary to achieve best performance. He performed experiments that he named "time and motion studies" in order to determine the optimal way to perform a job. The way he used in this study was very simple. He used a stopwatch to see the performance of employees who tried to finish same duty with different ways. The way was the optimal one which the most successful employee used in this experiment.


After years of experiments like I told above, Taylor published some principals:

1. Replace rule-of-thumb work methods with methods based on a scientific study of the tasks.

2. Scientifically select, train, and develop each worker rather than passively leaving them to train themselves.

3. Cooperate with the workers to ensure that the scientifically developed methods are being followed.

4. Divide work nearly equally between managers and workers, so that the managers apply scientific management principles to planning the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

These principals are known as 'Taylor's 4 Principles of Scientific Management' and these principals collectively termed as "Taylorism". Frederick W. Taylor is talked as the father of industrial engineering because of these principals on increment of efficiency.

Up to now, I have been talking about the advantages of "Taylorism" on productivity. However, there were also some disadvantages of these principals for the employees. If we want to talk about these disadvantages; the monotony of the works increased, employees started to do same thing continuously and The use of stopwatches led to strikes.