Abraham Harold Maslow

Abraham Harold Maslow (1908 - 1970)


Abraham Maslow developed a theory of personality that has influenced a number of different fields. He has set up a hierarchic theory of needs. All of his basic needs are instinctive, equival to instincts in animals.

According to Maslow, if the environment is right, people which started with a very weak disposition will grow straight and beautiful. However, if the environment is not right they will not grow tall and straight and beautiful.

Maslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied

Here are the list of Maslow's basic needs:

-Physiological needs,
-Safety needs,
-Needs of Love, affection and belongingness,
-Needs of esteem,
-Needs for self-actualization.

The hierarchic theory is generally assimilated as a pyramid, with the larger, lower levels representing the lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-performance. Maslow believes that the only reason that people would not move in direction of self-performance is because of difficulties placed in their way by society. He states that education is one of these difficulties. He recommends ways education can switch from its usual person-stunting tactics to person-growing approaches.

Frank Bunker Gilbreth - Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Frank Bunker Gilbreth -
Lillian Moller Gilbreth

Just like Taylor, another scientists who was also in the process of development of industrial engineering are Frank B. Gilbreth and Lillian M. Gilbreth.

Frank Gilbreth started his working career as a bricklayer. He always asked questions about his work to increase speed. With the studies they made (with his wife Lillian Moller Gilbreth), they became very successful and got their own constructing company. Normally a bricklayer had been using 120 bricks per hour. But as a result of their studies, 350 bricks started to be using per hour. It means they increased the working speed almost 200%.
From their various studies the Gilbreths developed, the laws of human motion from which evolved the principles of motion economy.

More effort by the workers is not needed for the increament in the work speed. Moreover, exhaustion is decreased, too.

Another subject that Frank Gilbreth studied on is "the analysis of the basic human motions". He categorized the basic human motions and these are named as "Therblig". Also he continued his study in this subject with "Micro Motion Study".

While Frank Gilbreth was studying on more technically subjects, Lillian Gilbreath was studying for human psychology as a behavioural researcher. According to Lillian, the purpose of the scientific management was to help people to increase their abilities.

Gilbreths also improved a promotion plan. According to this plan, workers do their job, prepare themselves for promotion and teach others at the same time.

Max Weber

Max Weber (1864 - 1920)


Weber, German thinker and sociologist , introduced common conceptual borders of sociology, developed a coherent social sciences philosphy and finally he declared the characteristics of the modern industrial society. Because of these, he is known as the father of modern sociology.

Weber claimed that sociology cannot reach general-current laws as natural sciences do. According to this, we try to reach universal laws in natural sciences. However it can't be the purpose of social sciences which tries to understand social activities in historial context.

Weber catagorized the social activity under 4 main titles. These are , with numerical order, traditional activity, emotional activity, rational activity and instrumental activity. Weber tried to find the origin of rationalism and saw it in the Protestant culture. Seeing this, because Protestant culture underlines self-confidence and rational science he thought Protestant Etiquettes had an important role in birth and development of capitalism.

Henri Fayol

Henri Fayol (1841 - 1925)


He born in Paris in 1841. He has worked in Commentary Fourchambault Coal Company from 1860 to 1918. He promoted and became head manager in 1888. Just before he became head manager, company was almost bankrupted. However in Fayol's management, company made big rushes. He announced his ideas to world with his article 'Administration Industrielle et Générale' in 1916. He had been continuing his study on management in 'Centre de l'Admisitration Scientific' before his death.

Executive Theory

Taylor's study on scientific management was limited to employees. Taylor saw that this system could be applied to upper degrees,too. But he did not make any special study on upper management.

According to Fayol , there has to be six different functions in a business:

1. Technical Functions
2. Commercial Functions
3. Financial Functions
4. Security Functions
5. Accounting Functions
6. Management Functions

Fayol dwelled upon the management functions and positted that there are five processes of management, basically.

Fayol's Ideas About Management Functions

-Planning

Planning was very important for Fayol. He thought the word "management" means prevision. Remembering about resources, possible problems in the future was vitally important while doing a plan.

-Organizing

Fayol suggests that there should not be more than six degrees of employees under the direction of a manager. Fayol also says it is useful for a organization diagram to show the ways of communication, to avoid coincidences between departments and show responsibilities of workers clearly.

-Implementation

Implementation function has to be used by the directors in a way which helps business to increase it's profit according to Fayol.

-Coordination

Fayol described a business which satisfied good coordination like that: All departments know about what the other departments had done. Sourcing Department knows what and when to buy, Production Department knows how much to generate, Financial Department knows when it must find money.

-Control

The purpose of the Control Function is to find inaccuracies and be sure about it to not to be made again.

Henry Ford

Henry Ford (1863-1947)

He became a machinist's apprentice in Detroit at the age of 16. He worked as a mechanical engineer between his 25 and 36. Then he got promoted to chief engineering. In 1903 he founded the Ford Motor Company.

He worked in a shipbuilder's yard. He was just an apprentice and the wage they gave him was lower than other workers get for doing similar things in other docks. But the advantage of that one was, he was able to imrove himself there. Most of the other workers were helping him by answering his questions and teaching him the tricks of work that they do. He was trying to learn everything he could. And he saw the way how a factory works, how workers communicate with each other and with engineers.

He used his inborn aptitude on mechanics in a right way and in a right time. These are the main factors that helped him to be very successful in his career.

He did not invent horseless carriage. There were many other people in this business; In America Durzea, Haynes, Maxim, Olds and the others, in Europe Daimler, Benz and the others. Ford succeeded in the bussiness, by using his knowledge on engineering, by cooperating with right people -Couzens, Dodge Brothers, Barney Oldfield etc.- and by providing financial support from Alex Malcomson and banker John S. Gray.

Henry Ford applied Taylor's principles in his automobile factories, and families even began to perform their household tasks based on the results of time and motion studies.

Ford surprised everyone when he offered 5 $/day , 8 hours per day and 40 hours per week working hours to his employees. Meanwhile, Nobody knew so much about the payroll book of Ford Motor Company.

He started Ford Family Charitable Foundation with his son Edsel in 1936. This foundation was the biggest one in the world which founded sciences, art, education etc.

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.