For example, Maids International Inc., a company that provides cleaning services to households and businesses, utilizes job rotation so that maids cleaning the kitchen in one house would clean the bedroom in a different one (Denton, 1994).

When employees periodically move to different jobs, the monotonous aspects of job specialization can be relieved. Job rotation involves moving employees from job to job at regular intervals. One of the early alternatives to job specialization was job rotation.

Rotation, Job Enlargement, and Enrichment With this level of efficiency, customers generally received their order within 1 minute (Spake, 2001 Business heroes, 2005). They divided up the tasks so that one person took the orders while someone else made the burgers, another person applied the condiments, and yet another wrapped them. One of the biggest innovations of the famous McDonald brothers’ first fast-food restaurant was the application of scientific management principles to their operations. Job specialization eventually found its way to the service industry as well. Assembly lines where each worker performs simple tasks in a repetitive manner are a direct result of job specialization efforts. Taylor’s work paved the way to automation and standardization that is virtually universal in today’s workplace. The concept of scientific management has had a lasting impact on how work is organized. For the first time, managers realized their role in influencing the output levels of employees. Yet, it is important to recognize the fundamental change in management mentality brought about by Taylor’s ideas. Today, Taylorism has a bad reputation, and it is often referred to as the “dark ages” of management when employees’ social motives were ignored. Also, job specialization is ineffective in rapidly changing environments where employees may need to modify their approach according to the demands of the situation (Wilson, 1999). On the other hand, from a motivational perspective, these jobs are boring and repetitive and therefore associated with negative outcomes such as absenteeism (Campion & Thayer, 1987). Training times for simple, repetitive jobs tend to be shorter as well. Breaking tasks into simple components and making them repetitive reduces the skill requirements of the jobs and decreases the effort and cost of staffing. There are a number of advantages to job specialization. Job specialization entails breaking down jobs into their simplest components and assigning them to employees so that each person would perform a select number of tasks in a repetitive manner. Each job would be carefully planned in advance, and employees would be paid to perform the tasks in the way specified by management.įurthermore, job specialization was one of the major advances of this approach. Therefore, standardized job performance methods were an important element of scientific management techniques. Using time–motion studies, management could determine how much time each task would require and plan the tasks so that the job could be performed as efficiently as possible. An important idea was to minimize waste by identifying the most efficient method to perform the job. Scientific management proposed a number of ideas that have been influential in job design in the following years. Kyle Harris – This old #Model T assembly line is awesome! – CC BY 2.0. Further, by providing training and specific instructions, he was able to dramatically reduce the number of laborers required to handle each job (Taylor, 1911 Wilson, 1999). As an example, Taylor found that instead of allowing workers to use their own shovels, as was the custom at the time, providing specially designed shovels increased productivity. He also believed that scientific methods could be used to increase productivity. He saw the inefficiencies inherent in employees’ production methods and argued that a manager’s job was to carefully plan the work to be performed by employees. He saw work being done haphazardly, with only workers in charge. Taylor was a mechanical engineer in the manufacturing industry. Taylor’s book is among the most influential books of the 20th century the ideas presented had a major influence over how work was organized in the following years. Scientific management is a philosophy based on the ideas of Frederick Taylor as presented in his 1911 book, Principles of Scientific Management. Perhaps the earliest attempt to design jobs came during the era of scientific management. Scientific Management and Job Specialization

Beholder 2 enhancing performance