MANAGEMENT BEHAVIOUR AND PRACTICE

Management Behaviour and Practice

Table of Content

TASK 14

1) Assess how Gilbreth's time and motion study builds on or improve the concept established by F.W.Taylor?4

2) Henry Ford is famous for making automobiles, but what makes him important is “how he made them”.7

How do you think Ford's unique idea has helped in development of modern “mass production”?8

3)In 1903 Gantt's came up with a concept of pectoral charting of production flows12

a.Asses how Gantt's chart can help in controlling production activities?12

b.To what extent Gantt's chart can be improved?12

TASK 216

1) Assess the impacts of Globalization?16

2) Assess circumstances which prompted Carter Goodrich to conclude his idea of “Frontier of control?19

3) Discuss Matrix organization structure in the modern world. Demonstrate understanding of circumstances requiring a matrix structure, Justify your answer with the help of modern examples?20

REFERENCES23

Task 1

1) Assess how Gilbreth's time and motion study builds on or improve the concept established by F.W.Taylor?

The idea of a Time and Motion Study is often still associated with production lines and manufacturing industry. It gained a bad reputation as a source of disagreement between "management" and "workers". However if used properly it can be of benefit to modern companies and their workforce.

Time and Motion studies have their roots in the work of Frederick Winslow Taylor who in 1911 published his famous article "The Principles of Scientific Management". Essentially this involved getting the best person for each job and training them to do it the best way possible. Although Taylor believed in cooperation between management and workers, "Taylorism" can be seen as formalizing the management/worker divide. Management would be responsible for deciding how things were done with workers simply doing what they were told. It was seen as dehumanizing, reducing skilled workers to the status of mechanical parts and resources.

Time and Motion study was refined in the early twentieth century by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth. The Gilbreths' preferred "motion study" to Taylor's "time study", however the term "Time and Motion" has tended to stick in popular terminology.

The Gilbreths studied the actions taken by workers at certain task with the aim of streamlining the processes involved. One of their most famous experiments involved analysing the work of bricklayers and significantly reducing the number of "operations" involved. This change benefited both employer (increased productivity) and employee (decreased fatigue).

The Gilbreths developed a categorisation system for the different basic activities which went to make up a task. These were called Therbligs (an anagram of "Gilbreths"). The basic Therbligs numbered around 15 (the system developed over time) and included such actions as "find", "select" and "rest". Each of these was represented by an icon, for example an eye for "find". The activity of a worker could then be plotted on a Simo Chart ("Simultaneous Motion Chart") for optimisation.

One problem for Time and Motion studies is what is known as the Hawthorne Effect (named after a factory not a person). This in essence says that employees change their behaviour when they know that they are being measured - the mere act of performing a study ...