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Foundations of Organisational Behaviour Lecture 1

Understanding Organisational Behaviour, Roberts and Corbett

Introduction and Scientific Management

Fordism

Organisations not run on rational behaviour

Two main perspectives

• Managerialist
• oMainstream and rational
• oFocus on trying to get best system
• oOnly interested in interests of management
• Critical approach
• oCalls managerialist ‘sanitised’
• oMore focused on workforce
• oOrganisations are complex with a dynamic pattern of behaviour

Scientific Management (Taylorism)

Taylor: how to make life more efficient

• Efficient way to eat a boiled egg
• Very few large organisations during his time (early 19^th century)
• o‘Rule of thumb’: copy those who succeeded before you
• oApprenticeship model of learning
• §Very little innovation. Good only for teaching basic skills

Railways changed perspective organisational behaviour

• Everyone forced to work on same time

Taylor’s revolutionary technology: Watch

• Most important thing is how you control time
• Cutting time is the way to cut costs

Notices wasted time and effort fur to:

• Factory layout
• oFacilitates unnecessary communication
• Natural soldiering
• oHuman nature to avoid work (normal)
• Systematic soldiering
• oOrganised avoidance of work
• oPeople don’t work themselves as hard as they could
• §No incentive
• §If you do work hard and productivity goes up, people are removed from labour force
• §Taylor: these workers are absolutely rational
• Management problem. Keep removing people once you get efficiency up
• Way to stop this:
• oGetting rid of negative incentive and add positive incentive to work hard

Workers able to do this because management haven’t experienced shop floor

Work Gangs: knowledge is power

• Work has to be analysed, measured, redesigned and divided up
• Deskilled workforce
• oCheaper workforce
• oJob process will become much more efficient (more boring)
• §Need stupid workforce
• Radical division of labour
• Insistent on individual incentives
• oStop them from getting involved in systematic soldiering
• §If paid as groups, they form a collective movement
• Moral revolution
• oRequired for scientific management to work
• oPeople now doing mundane jobs have to accept this is part of the way of getting more money and improving lifestyle

Distinction between conception (management) and execution (workers)

There has to be one best way of doing a job

Scientific selection of best person for the newly designed job

Restriction of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe

• Assumptions of unskilled workers
• Not as intelligent as US workers
• oTaylorism comes into arena at same time as this immigration problem

Taylor: have to find right type of intelligence for right job

• Doesn’t always require most intelligent people

Time and Motion Studies

• Shifting pig iron
• oWants someone who is strong but dumb
• §Finding the best scientific way
• o12 to 47
• Big difference between people designing jobs and those doing the jobs

Shift in power and knowledge of work done by a person away from that person and to the management

Taylor: doesn’t care about workers ideas

Sacked. Not surprised

• Human nature
• No moral revolution
• oGenerating the unions he’s trying to get rid of (ironic)
• oLenin: use revolution to use Taylorism to improve collective wealth

Taylorist methods – Critical Evaluation

Is primary task of management control or profit?

• Taylor: control is a prerequisite for profit

Donal Roy: ‘banana time’

• How do people cope with boredom, which is directly a consequence of Taylorism
• People become insane
• oWay of coping. People are breaking up the day to pass the time. We all do this

Fordism

Henry Ford – knew how factories worked (similar to Taylor)

Reintroduced

• Moving assembly line
• Standardised parts and tools used to make those parts

Ford interested in vertical integration

• Getting everything in one place
• oReducing the cost from outside

Against Just-in-Time situation

• Lacks control. He hates it

Cashback scheme. Cost $11m. Why did he do this even though demand was increasing?

• Share ownership in Ford. Wants share price to drop and people will sell back shares to him so he has total control

Brand loyalty and market share: even as demand increases, he drops price

Implements Taylorism

• Increases individual skill level by increasing division of labour
• oLabour costs cut in half by 1914
• oLabour hours per car dropped from 357 hours in 1909 to 134 hours in 1916
• Organisational effects: higher efficiency and higher productivity
• Individual effects: many (including immigrants) found jobs as work did not require high level of skills
• oBut workers, found the pace of work and its repetitive over-simplified nature difficult to bare and staff turnover was high.

Attempts to deal with boredom:

• Program of benefits and bonuses
• 1914: he raised the pay of $2.38 for a nine-hour day to $5 for an eight-hour day, plus a profit sharing plan

So concerned with monitoring: not cheap

While Taylor deskilled labour, Ford tried to displace labour

• Fordism produced alienation and deskilling
• Fordism has facilitated mass production and hence consumption. It is also template still used today because it represents an efficient way of mass producing goods and services