Scientific management

Scientific management organizes work through systematic measurement, standardized procedures, worker selection and training, and managerial planning. Frederick Winslow Taylor’s approach sought to improve efficiency by replacing informal methods with tested work practices.

Time and motion study: A method for analyzing work by measuring task durations and studying workers’ movements. Measurement breaks jobs into observable actions and helps identify faster procedures.
Frederick Winslow Taylor: An American engineer whose work on factory efficiency established the principles known as scientific management. Taylor formulated and promoted the approach through industrial experiments and published works.
Henry Gantt: An American engineer who developed a chart for scheduling work and contributed to scientific management. Gantt’s planning tools made production schedules visible and trackable.
Human relations movement: A management tradition emphasizing social relationships, group dynamics, and employee morale in workplaces. It shifted attention from task optimization toward workers’ social and psychological experience.
Assembly line: A production arrangement in which a product moves through a sequence of workstations as tasks are performed. Standardized tasks and planned workflows helped make assembly-line production more systematic.
Taylorism: The system of work organization associated with Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management. Taylor’s specific system gave this approach its best-known form.
The Principles of Scientific Management: Frederick Winslow Taylor’s 1911 book outlining his system for organizing and managing work. This book set out the approach’s principles for a broad audience.
Harrington Emerson: An American efficiency engineer who promoted systematic methods for improving industrial and organizational performance. Emerson popularized efficiency principles beyond Taylor’s own industrial projects.
Fordism: A system of mass production based on standardized products, assembly lines, and high-volume output. Fordism shares standardization but centers production scale and the moving assembly line.
Industrial engineering: An engineering discipline that designs and improves systems involving people, materials, information, equipment, and energy. Scientific management helped establish the systematic study of industrial work that this field develops.

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