BY
CHARLES LAMSON
The second group of people who helped develop the traditional strategy of organizing focused on scientific management. Like the bureaucratic theorists, they were concerned with accountability. In fact, Frederick Taylor, the father of scientific management, was very disturbed by a common managerial practice of blaming and punishing workers for management's bad decisions. That practice reduced organizational efficiency, because managers who are not held accountable for their own errors, have no incentive to improve. It also inevitably drove a wedge between labor and management. Management's primary goal should be to foster cooperative relationships with workers. For Taylor, accountability bred efficiency.
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Although these attitudes may not seem to be all that radical today, they were startling to Taylor's contemporaries. They were palatable only because Taylor coupled them with a set of efficiency-enhancing techniques that had significant short-term economic benefits. Taylor believed that by using these techniques, firms would be able to increase their profits, and the incomes of all their employees, including managers. Over time, they would be able to increase their profits and the entire society would benefit. The best known of these techniques was the time-motion study, in which a supervisor or a consultant observes workers completing a task, breaks the process down into its elements or motions, and then redesigns it to minimize the number of movements necessary to complete it. By using the improved techniques, workers could increase their productivity and income and thereby increase the organization's profits. Today, a number of consulting firms, armed with sophisticated video technology, still conduct time-motion studies and make recommendations that improve efficiency and reduce worker strain and fatigue. For example, Charlie Conrad helped fund his college education by working summers and vacations in a metal-processing foundry. Initially, he operated a drill press.
However, the company conducted a time-motion study, and could not efficiently operate the equipment. They had to bend over to reach some of the levers, and as a result got tired sooner than shorter workers did. Like every other operator who was taller than six feet, Conrad was transferred to a division that had tasks that could be efficiently performed by people of his height. Taylor stressed that time-motion studies, and all of the other techniques he developed, should be used in close consultation with workers, and in an atmosphere of cooperation and mutual gain. If they are used without first consulting workers, as they often are, they generate strong resistance, especially if there is a low level of trust between labor and management..  Today firms, such as the ones Taylor envisioned, are often viewed as sweatshops where workers are treated like parts of a giant industrial machine. In addition, the term bureaucracy carries negative images: inefficient bureaucrats producing little, except exhaustive expense accounts; customers and employees alike, being buried in red tape, and treated without dignity, in a vast administrative morass and stubbornness. These types of pictures of the traditional strategy of organizing are really quite ironic, because the original purpose of this strategy was to create efficient and productive organizations in which people were treated fairly and equitably. The arbitrariness and capriciousness that Taylor and Weber observed in the organizations of their time, were to be replaced by policies and procedures that treated everyone - workers, customers and clients - in the same way. The infinite decision making of early firms was to be replaced by objective database considerations. Although the strategies focused on meeting the organization's needs for stability and autonomy. Bureaucratic structure is clear, stable and predictable. But the traditional strategy is also problematic in two ways. Perhaps most important, its key elements - specialization, hierarchization and centralization - place a great deal of pressure on an organization's formal communication system. Consequently, communication break downs are highly likely. Second, the strategy sacrifices flexibility and responsiveness for consistency and predictability. Although this is an appropriate trade off for some organizations, it creates serious problems for others.
*SOURCE: STRATEGIC ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY 6TH ED; CHARLES CONRAD AND MARSHALL SCOTT POOLE;PGS. 70-71*
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