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Chapter 1 told you what a manager does. This chapter tells you what a manager should keep in mind while doing it — the tested general guidelines that two engineers, one French and one American, drew out of a lifetime inside real organisations.
Chapter 1 established management as a process carried on at three levels through five functions — planning, organising, staffing, directing and controlling. It told you what the manager does.
It did not tell you how the manager should decide once inside that process. A works head who must choose between promoting on seniority and promoting on merit is performing the staffing function either way — naming the function does not settle the question.
What guides a manager inside the process? The answer is a body of general guidelines, built by observation and experiment, called the principles of management.
Six stops. The last two are where the paper actually catches people out.
Units 1, 2 and 3 together carry 16 marks. Within them Unit 2 is the reliable source of case-based questions: a three-line story and the instruction "identify and explain the principle of management being violated". So every principle below arrives with a case attached, and every answer is drilled the same five ways — read, identify, name it in the exam's exact words, explain in one line, quote the proving line.
Principles of management are broad and general guidelines to the decision-making and behaviour of managers. They are derived by the observation and analysis of events which managers face in actual practice, and they establish a cause and effect relationship, so that a manager can predict the likely consequence of an action.
Two branch heads must fill one supervisor's vacancy. Ritu Sabharwal promotes the longest-serving clerk; Deepak Ohri promotes the highest scorer on the appraisal. Both are performing the same staffing function; what separates them is the guideline each carried into the decision — seniority or merit.
A function tells you which job a manager is doing. A principle tells you how the judgement inside that job should be made. That is why this chapter sits between "the functions" and everything that follows them.
"The principles of scientific management are functional foremanship, time study, motion study and the differential piece wage system."
Every one of those four is a technique. Written under the word "principle", the answer scores nothing — not part marks, nothing — because the examiner asked for a different list. This is the single most expensive error available in Unit 2.
Techniques of management are the procedures or methods, involving a series of steps, that are actually carried out to accomplish a desired goal. Principles are the guidelines a manager uses while practising those techniques.
| Basis | Principle of management | Technique of management |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | A broad, general guideline to decision-making and behaviour. | A procedure or method — a defined series of steps. |
| Nature | Tells you what to keep in mind while deciding. | Tells you how the work is actually to be done. |
| Example | Unity of command; esprit de corps; science, not rule of thumb. | Functional foremanship; method study; differential piece wage system. |
| Basis | Principle of pure science | Principle of management |
|---|---|---|
| Subject matter | Deals with physical phenomena — matter, energy, chemical reaction. | Deals with human behaviour, which is never static. |
| Rigidity | Rigid. Water boils at 100 °C at sea level, every time, for everyone. | Flexible. They must be applied creatively, as the demands of the situation require. |
| Result | Gives an exact and repeatable result. | Gives a likely result — the cause-and-effect link is real but approximate. |
| Application | Applied uniformly everywhere. | Contingent — the application changes with the situation. |
Values are general rules for behaviour in society and carry a moral content; principles of management are technical guidelines formed after research in work situations. A manager still cannot neglect values, because a business owes social and ethical duties — but the two words are not interchangeable in an answer.
Seven features. A 4-mark question wants four of them; a 6-mark question wants six.
They apply to all kinds of organisation — business and non-business, small and large, public sector and private, manufacturing and services. Only the extent of application varies.
Case: division of work operates in a government despatch section (one diary clerk, one data-entry operator) and at Kaveri Pumps, Coimbatore (separate casting, machining, assembly and testing shops) alike.
They are guidelines to action, not readymade, straitjacket solutions, because real business situations are complex and dynamic.
Case: when Vanya's sales and production departments quarrel over a launch date, the principle only tells the MD to put the overall goal first. It does not name the date.
They come from the experience and collective wisdom of managers and from experiment — never from armchair theory.
Case: Rangoli Textiles, Surat ran a six-week trial of two extra ten-minute breaks per shift before writing the rest interval into its standing orders.
They are not rigid prescriptions. A manager has the discretion to modify them when the situation so demands.
Case: the degree of centralisation right for a four-person start-up and for a 2,000-worker mill cannot be the same, and Fayol never said it should be.
They aim at influencing the behaviour of human beings. They are not silent about things and machines — it is a matter of emphasis.
Laying out a plant so that the flow of men matches the flow of material is orderliness applied to people and to things.
They tell a manager what is likely to follow if a principle is applied in a situation, so the insight can be reused in similar cases.
They are less than perfect, precisely because human situations are never identical. Say this — the qualification itself earns credit.
Application depends on the prevailing situation at that point of time, and must be changed as requirements change.
"Fair remuneration" is settled by the employee's contribution, the employer's paying capacity and the going wage rate for that occupation.
R. Natarajan, who runs a 240-worker pump unit, was told by a consultant to copy the exact shift pattern of a Chennai auto-components plant. He refused. "Their line runs one product all year; mine changes casting size four times a month. I will take the idea of a fixed rest interval and set my own length for it."
Identify the features of the nature of management principles that Natarajan is relying on, and quote the line that proves it.
Six points — so this is a 6-mark question, and six marks means six headed points, never a paragraph.
Ananya Bose took over her father's 60-worker workshop in 2023. She stopped quoting jobs "by feel", built a costing sheet from three years of past orders, and published a wage grid so that no fitter could claim a favour. Rejection fell from 11% to 4% and the workshop stopped losing money on the jobs it had priced in a hurry.
Which points of the significance of management principles does Ananya's turnaround illustrate? Name four, in the exam's words.
A student writes: "Management principles cannot be universal, because a hospital and a steel plant are completely different; and in any case they are flexible, which means a manager is free to ignore them."
Two claims. One is a misunderstanding of a real feature; the other is simply wrong. Separate them.
Henri Fayol (1841–1925), a French mining engineer, joined a coal and iron combine as a junior engineer, became its Managing Director in 1888 when it was ailing, and left it a flourishing coal and steel combine. He wrote up what he had learnt as General and Industrial Management (1916).
He is called the Father of General Management, and his work is known as Administrative Theory.
Fayol worked downward from the top: the office, the board, the whole administration. His fourteen principles are about how an organisation should be governed.
Taylor, whom we meet after him, worked upward from the shop floor. Keep the two settings apart in every answer — a Fayol answer set at a lathe, or a Taylor answer set in a board meeting, reads as a misunderstanding even when the words are right.
Fayol also divided all industrial activity into six groups — technical, commercial, financial, security, accounting and managerial — and it was the sixth that he said had never been analysed. Chapter 1's five functions are his managerial group, refined.
Division of work · Authority and responsibility · Unity of command · Scalar chain · Order
Unity of direction · Subordination of individual interest to general interest · Centralisation and decentralisation
Discipline · Remuneration of employees · Equity · Stability of personnel
Initiative · Esprit de corps
No case-based question has ever been answered by reciting "DAUSO". You will be given three lines about a real firm and asked which principle is at work. So each of the fourteen now gets its own statement and its own case. Learn the case; the name comes with it.
Work should be divided into small tasks and each task assigned to the person best suited to it, so that the same person performs the same job repeatedly, gains specialisation, and produces greater efficiency and accuracy of output. Fayol held it applies to all kinds of work — technical as well as managerial.
Until 2022 R. Natarajan personally handled purchase, costing, despatch and every customer complaint, and answered none of them well. He created four departments — Purchase, Costing, Despatch and Customer Service — with one manager accountable for each. Quotation turnaround fell from nine days to two, because the same manager now prices every enquiry and prices it better each time.
Because it covers technical work too, splitting Kaveri's shop into casting, machining, assembly and testing is division of work as well. But Taylor's functional foremanship is a shop-floor technique that puts eight specialists over one worker — do not name one when the question calls for the other, and keep a Fayol answer at the departmental level where the examiner expects it.
Authority is the right to give orders and obtain obedience; responsibility is the obligation to complete the task assigned, and is the corollary of authority. There must be a balance between the two. Authority without responsibility leads to the misuse of power; responsibility without authority makes a manager ineffective.
The Head of Trade Marketing is held answerable for a ₹4 crore quarterly sales target, but every scheme she designs must be signed off by the MD, who is travelling three weeks a month. She missed the target twice running because two schemes reached the market eleven days late, and she had no power to release them herself.
Fayol's principle is only about keeping authority and responsibility in balance. Accountability — being answerable for the final outcome, and never delegable — belongs to Chapter 5 and is a different word with a different mark.
Discipline is obedience to organisational rules and to the employment agreement, which are necessary for the working of the organisation. Fayol held that discipline requires good superiors at all levels, clear and fair agreements, and the judicious application of penalties.
The union agreed to raise loom efficiency to 88% in return for a 6% wage rise from April. Efficiency reached 89%. The mill then deferred the rise to October, saying orders were weak; within a fortnight absenteeism in the weaving shed had doubled.
Discipline is a two-way commitment. Here it is management that broke it, not the workers. An answer that reduces discipline to "punishing employees who break rules" has only half the principle.
There should be one and only one boss for every individual employee — each subordinate should receive orders from, and be responsible to, only one superior. Fayol held that if this principle is violated, authority is undermined, discipline is in jeopardy, order disturbed and stability threatened.
Sujoy Das, who prices customer enquiries from the workshop's one-room office, is told by the Sales Manager to quote 8% off to win a repeat order, and by the Works Manager to quote nothing below list price because the shed is already full. On 14 March the two instructed him within the same hour; he sent out the quotation the louder man dictated, and a ₹2.1 lakh export enquiry went to a competitor.
The violation has a name: dual subordination. Write it. Note also that Taylor's functional foremanship deliberately breaks this principle — which is exactly why Fayol and Taylor differ on it, and why that row appears in the comparison table at the end of this chapter.
Each group of activities having the same objective must have one head and one plan. This ensures unity of action and coordination and prevents the overlapping of activities.
Vanya sells soaps and detergents. Until last year one marketing head ran both, on one budget and one plan. Both categories then ran competing festive discounts in the same Rajasthan towns in the same fortnight, and each ate the other's volume. Vanya has now created a Soaps Division and a Detergents Division, each with its own head and its own plan.
A company making both motorcycles and cars should have two divisions, each with its own incharge and its own plan — not one head trying to run both. Quote it; it is the textbook's illustration.
"Unity of command means the whole organisation should pull in one direction under one plan." That is unity of direction, written under the other name — and the examiner marks the name. The two words that separate them are employee and group: unity of command counts bosses per person, unity of direction counts plans per group.
| Basis | Unity of command | Unity of direction |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | One employee, one boss — orders from a single superior only. | One group, one head, one plan for activities having the same objective. |
| Aim | Prevents dual subordination. | Prevents the overlapping of activities. |
| Relates to | The individual employee and his superior. | The whole organisation and its plans. |
| Effect of violation | Confusion, divided loyalty, undermined authority. | Duplication of effort, wasted resources, departments working at cross purposes. |
At Vanya, the Soaps Division head reports to both the MD and the Chief Marketing Officer, who disagree on the launch date. Which principle is violated, and why is it not the other one?
The interest of the organisation must take priority over the interest of any one individual employee. A manager must reconcile the two wherever he can, and must set the example himself by not using his authority for personal or family benefit at the cost of the larger interest of the company.
The Purchase Manager placed the full year's bearing order with his brother-in-law's firm at ₹214 a unit. Two other suppliers had quoted ₹186 with the same warranty, and the works had never been consulted.
Fayol's principle is about the group outranking one person. Taylor's is about management and workers ending their class conflict. If the case is about a manager favouring himself, it is Fayol; if it is about a shop floor and its management pulling against each other, it is Taylor.
Employees should be paid fair and equitable wages that give them at least a reasonable standard of living and that are at the same time within the paying capacity of the company. Fair remuneration ensures a congenial atmosphere and good relations between workers and management.
Rangoli pays its sizing operators ₹9,800 a month. The three mills on the same road pay ₹14,200 for the same job. Rangoli replaced eleven of its fourteen operators last year and its profit after tax was ₹6.4 crore.
"Fair" is judged against both the going wage rate and the firm's paying capacity. Rangoli fails on both counts here — a ₹6.4 crore profit is capacity. Note the contrast with Taylor's differential piece wage system, which is a technique about the method of paying, not a principle about the fairness of pay.
Centralisation is the concentration of decision-making authority in a few hands at the top; decentralisation is its dispersal among more than one person. Fayol held there must be a proper balance between the two, the degree depending on the circumstances — in general, large organisations need more decentralisation than small ones.
Vanya's four regional heads may approve trade discounts up to ₹5 lakh without reference upward; anything larger, and every decision on plant location, goes to the Board. "Ninety per cent of my discount decisions clear the same day, and I have never had to argue about opening a factory."
Careful. For Fayol this is one principle about balance: every organisation has both, and the question is only how much of each. In Chapter 5 the word decentralisation is used much more narrowly — the systematic delegation of authority throughout all levels of the organisation — and it is set against delegation, which is one manager handing part of his authority to one subordinate. Same word, tighter meaning. Answer the question the chapter asked.
The formal lines of authority and communication running from the highest to the lowest rank are called the scalar chain, and it should be followed in the normal course. In an emergency, two employees at the same level may communicate directly through a short cut called the gang plank, keeping their superiors informed.
E and O — equals — to speak directly when delay would cost the company, and to tell their respective bosses afterwards.
E to speak to M or to A. A short cut between different levels is not a gang plank — it is a breach of the scalar chain and of unity of command.
A container ship sails at 18:00. At 15:40 the assembly supervisor finds forty pumps unpacked and the despatch supervisor idle. He walked across, agreed the crating between themselves, and each sent his own manager a note the same evening.
Using Case 12, name the concept the two supervisors used, state the principle it belongs to, give the two conditions that make it legitimate, and quote the proving line.
People and materials must be in suitable places at the appropriate time for maximum efficiency. The principle is stated as a place for everything (everyone) and everything (everyone) in its place — which removes hindrances to activity and raises productivity.
Ananya painted a shadow board for every bench, fixed a numbered rack for each die, and moved the inspection table next to the exit rather than at the far corner. The average hunt for a tool fell from nine minutes to under one, and no fitter now walks the length of the shed twice for the same job.
Students routinely write "discipline" for a case about tools lying scattered on the floor. Discipline is obedience to rules and agreements; Order is orderly placement of people and things. A messy shop is Order; a broken wage agreement is Discipline.
Managers should show kindliness and justice in their behaviour towards workers, so that there is no discrimination on grounds of gender, religion, language, caste, belief or nationality. Equity secures the loyalty and devotion of employees.
Rangoli's packing shed employs 90 migrant workers from Odisha and 60 from Gujarat, on the same grade. The canteen subsidy and the two overtime slots were given only to the Gujarati workers, "because they will stay".
Fayol expressly allowed that lazy personnel be dealt with sternly — precisely to show that everyone is equal in the eyes of management. So "treating everyone identically" is not the principle; treating everyone justly is. Note also that this word has nothing to do with equity share capital in Chapters 9 and 10 — a genuine trap in a mixed paper.
Employee turnover should be minimised to maintain organisational efficiency. Personnel should be selected and appointed after a due and rigorous procedure, and once selected should be kept in the post for a minimum fixed tenure and given reasonable time to show results.
Vanya changed the head of its Rajasthan region four times in twenty-two months. Each new head rewrote the distributor scheme within a month of joining, and two of the state's largest distributors have since moved to a competitor.
Fayol's point is about retention — a minimum tenure, and time to show results. The machinery of selection is Chapter 6's subject, and quoting the seven steps of selection here answers a question that was not asked.
Initiative means taking the first step with self-motivation — thinking out and executing a plan. Workers should be encouraged to develop and carry out their plans for improvement, and a good company should run an employee suggestion system in which suggestions that cut cost or time are rewarded.
A machinist proposed re-cutting the test-rig fixture so that two pump bodies could be pressure tested at once. Kaveri paid him ₹15,000 from its suggestion fund and printed his photograph on the shop notice board; nineteen more suggestions arrived in the next quarter.
It does not mean going against the established practices of the company for the sake of being different. And it is narrower than Taylor's Cooperation, not individualism, where welcoming suggestions is only one element of ending management–worker conflict altogether.
Management should promote a spirit of team unity and harmony among employees. A manager should replace "I" with "We" in all his conversations with workers, so as to build mutual trust and a sense of belongingness, which minimises the need for penalties.
When a gearbox order was rejected by the customer, Ananya told the shop: "We got the tolerance wrong and we will re-cut it this week" — she named no individual, and the whole bench stayed back on Saturday without being asked.
The exact phrase esprit de corps is the mark — spelled correctly. It is team spirit among employees, horizontally. Taylor's Harmony, not discord is peace between management and workers, vertically. A case about two shifts blaming each other is Fayol; a case about a union and a board is Taylor.
Write a four-line case set in a Surat textile mill that could only be answered Stability of Personnel — not Remuneration of Employees, and not Discipline.
Rangoli Textiles pays its loom masters ₹18,600, the best rate on the road, and has never broken a settlement with its union. But it transfers every loom master to a new shed after four months "to keep them fresh", and the new man spends six weeks relearning the shed's warp faults. Three of the last five have resigned inside a year.
That is the transferable skill: a good case rules out the neighbours in its own words before it proves its own answer.
Vanya's new Head of Supply Chain, Farhan Qureshi, may not change a single freight contract without the MD's approval, yet is measured on delivery cost. When a Nagpur depot flooded on a Sunday, he telephoned the Head of Sales directly — his equal — agreed a diversion to Bhopal, and copied both their bosses that night. Afterwards the MD reprimanded him publicly, while the Sales head was not spoken to at all.
Three principles are in play here — one violated by the company's design, one correctly applied by Farhan, and one violated by the MD. Name and explain all three.
Scientific management means applying the methods of science — observation, measurement, experiment and analysis — to the problems of management, so as to find the one best way of doing every job.
Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), an American mechanical engineer. He began as an apprentice machinist in 1874 and learnt factory conditions at the grass roots, then rose to be Chief Engineer at Midvale Steel and later worked with Bethlehem Steel. His book The Principles of Scientific Management was published in 1911.
He is called the Father of Scientific Management.
The rule of thumb: each foreman handling problems by personal judgement, so nothing learnt in one shop could be transferred to the next. It worked, after a fashion — but it was a trial and error approach, and no one could say what worked or why.
Taylor's answer: break a job into its parts, measure each to the second, and settle the best method by evidence.
Fayol looked downward from top management; Taylor looked upward from the shop floor. Keep every Taylor case in a workshop, a mill or a plant.
Taylor wrote four principles and, separately, a set of techniques. The board examines them as two different questions. A candidate who answers "explain the principles of scientific management" with functional foremanship and time study has written a correct list under the wrong heading and scores nothing.
Ask: can I carry it out with a stopwatch, a form or a pay slip? Then it is a technique. If it only tells you what attitude to bring, it is a principle.
There is only one best method of doing every job, and it should be developed through study and analysis. This scientifically developed standard method must replace the rule of thumb followed by different managers throughout the organisation.
Three foremen each set the impeller-fitting sequence their own way; scrap ran between 3% and 12% depending on whose shift it was. Kaveri filmed all three sequences, measured them over 400 units, wrote the best one into a single instruction card, and required every shift to follow it. Scrap settled at 2.4%.
This is a principle. Method study, motion study, time study and standardisation are the techniques through which it is put into practice — mention them as the means if you like, but never as the principle itself.
There should be complete harmony between management and workers instead of class conflict, since a conflict between the two helps neither. Taylor called for a complete mental revolution on the part of both — management should share the gains of the company with workers, and workers should work hard and accept change for the good of the company.
The union had struck twice over automatic loom monitors. The mill then opened its books to the union committee and agreed that 40% of the saving from the monitors would go into a shed-wide bonus. The union withdrew its objection and the workers themselves proposed running the monitors on the night shift first.
Taylor's claim was that the true interests of the two are one and the same: prosperity for the employer cannot exist for long unless it is accompanied by prosperity for the employees. That sentence is the whole of the mental revolution, and it is the difference between a 2-mark answer and a 4-mark one.
There should be complete cooperation between labour and management instead of individualism, and competition should be replaced by cooperation. Management must welcome and reward employees' suggestions and take workers into confidence before important decisions; workers must desist from strikes and unreasonable demands. Taylor asked for an almost equal division of work and responsibility between workers and management.
Before buying a second CNC machine, Ananya put the two shortlisted models to the fitters who would run them. The bench chose the slower machine because its tool change was simpler, and no worker was retrenched — the surplus hands were retrained as programmers.
This is an extension of Harmony, not discord. Do not confuse it with Fayol's Subordination of individual interest, which is the group outranking one person; nor with Fayol's Initiative, where a suggestion scheme is the whole point rather than one element of it.
Each worker should be scientifically selected, given work that suits his physical, mental and intellectual capabilities, and given the required training in the best method — so that every person develops to his greatest efficiency. Efficient workers produce more and earn more, bringing prosperity to both the worker and the company.
Kaveri began testing new hands on grip strength, eyesight and a simple aptitude paper, then put the steadiest on precision balancing and the strongest on the foundry. Each was trained for six weeks in the single instruction-card method before being put on the line, and average earnings in the balancing bay rose 22%.
The differential piece wage system is the technique that rewards the efficiency this principle builds. Principle first, technique second — never the other way round in an answer.
Rangoli's new works head did four things in his first year. He replaced three foremen's rival warping sequences with one written standard drawn from 300 measured runs. He opened the costing to the union and shared 40% of the saving. He put each hand on the job that suited his aptitude and trained him in the standard for six weeks. And he told the union: "You are not to be managed by us, you are to run this shed with us — half the responsibility for the standard is yours."
Identify the four principles of scientific management at work, one per action.
A student writes: "Taylor's Harmony, not Discord and Fayol's Esprit de Corps are the same principle in two languages — both say the workplace should be friendly."
Show that they are not, using one case that could be resolved only as Taylor's and one that could be resolved only as Fayol's.
Read them as a chain, and they stop being a list to memorise.
The search for efficiency requires the search for the one best method; the chosen method must yield a fair day's work; and the pay system must differentiate those who achieve it. That single sentence links all seven, and it is what turns a list into an argument.
Functional foremanship is Taylor's technique of separating planning from execution and placing each worker under eight specialist foremen. It is an extension of division of work and specialisation to the shop floor.
Taylor listed the qualities a good foreman needs — intelligence, education, tact, grit, judgement, special knowledge, manual dexterity, energy, honesty and good health — and found that no single person had them all. So he split the role and matched each specialist to his own strengths: technical mastery and grit to planning, energy and good health to execution.
Kaveri's machining bay now runs on this pattern. The route clerk fixes the sequence of operations before the shift starts, the speed boss holds the shift to it, and the inspector alone passes or rejects the part — the machinist himself decides nothing about how the job is planned.
Functional foremanship deliberately violates Fayol's unity of command, because one worker now takes orders from eight foremen. Taylor did not consider that a defect; he thought specialised supervision was worth more than a single boss. Say so — that sentence is the "Unity of Command" row of the Fayol-versus-Taylor table.
Explain functional foremanship: what it separates, who sits under each incharge, and one principle of management it conflicts with.
Standardisation is the process of setting standards or benchmarks for every business activity — of process, raw material, time, product, machinery, method or working conditions — which must then be adhered to during production.
Simplification aims at eliminating superfluous varieties, sizes and dimensions — that is, unnecessary diversity.
| Basis | Standardisation | Simplification |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | Devises a new standard variety and requires everyone to follow it. | Eliminates superfluous existing varieties. |
| Aim | Fix types and sizes, establish interchangeability of parts, set standards of quality and of performance for men and machines. | Cut unnecessary diversity out of the product range. |
| Result | Consistent quality, a benchmark to control against. | Reduced inventories, fuller utilisation of equipment, savings in labour, machines and tools, and increased turnover. |
Ananya cut the shop's gearbox range from 34 models to 11 (simplification) and then fixed one grade of alloy, one hardening cycle and one inspection gauge for all eleven (standardisation). Stores value fell 38%.
A standard is worthless unless it is followed, which is where Fayol's Discipline meets Taylor's technique: Taylor sets the benchmark, Fayol's principle is what makes the shop adhere to it. Standardisation is still a technique, never a principle.
Method study is the technique of finding the one best way of doing a job, covering every activity from the procurement of raw material until the final product is delivered to the customer, so as to minimise the cost of production and maximise customer satisfaction.
Kaveri redrew its whole pump line — the sequence of operations, where each machine stands, where the castings are staged and where the tester sits. The half-built pump now travels 40 metres instead of 310, and no trolley crosses another trolley's path.
Taylor devised the concept of the assembly line using method study; Ford used it to build the Model T. That is the standard illustration and it is worth quoting. Note that method study is an extension of Fayol's division of work to the design of the job itself.
Motion study is the study of the movements — lifting, putting objects down, sitting, changing position — undertaken while doing a job, so that unnecessary movements are eliminated and the job is completed in less time.
Taylor and Frank Gilbreth reduced the motions in brick laying from 18 to 5, and productivity rose about fourfold. Taylor used stopwatches, symbols and colours to sort body motions into three kinds: productive, incidental (walking to the stores) and unproductive.
Filming the sizing operator showed him turning through 180° for every beam he loaded. Moving the beam trolley to his right hand removed one full turn per beam — 340 turns a shift — and the loading time per beam fell from 94 seconds to 61.
Motion study deals with which movements; time study deals with how long. And both are helped by Fayol's Order — a place for everything is what makes a wasted movement visible.
Time study determines the standard time taken to perform a well-defined job, by taking several readings with a time-measuring device for each element of the task. Its objectives are to determine the number of workers to be employed, to frame suitable incentive schemes, and to determine labour costs.
Standard time to make one cardboard box = 20 minutes → 3 boxes an hour. An 8-hour shift less 1 hour for rest and lunch = 7 working hours → the standard task is 21 boxes a shift. Wages can then be fixed against that figure.
Sixty timed readings across three shifts set the standard for assembling one 5 HP pump body at 21 minutes. Kaveri now knows it needs eleven fitters, not fourteen, to clear 220 bodies a day — and it knows exactly what a body costs in labour.
The standard time is what makes fair pay measurable. Fayol's Remuneration of employees says pay must be fair; time study is how Taylor proposed to find out what fair is.
Fatigue study seeks to determine the amount and frequency of rest intervals required for completing a task. A worker who does not rest cannot work at the same capacity, so proper rest intervals help him regain stamina and thereby increase productivity.
Rangoli's dye house runs at 41 °C in May. Output was falling away steeply after the third hour. Two extra ten-minute breaks were inserted at 11:00 and 15:00; output over the full shift rose 7% despite twenty minutes less working time.
Long working hours, unsuitable work, uncordial relations with the boss, bad working conditions. Taylor's point is that these are hindrances to good performance and are management's to remove — not the worker's weakness. Fayol reaches the same place through Equity: kindliness and justice in the manager's behaviour.
"Motion study finds the standard time for a job." It does not — that is time study. These four are the most frequently swapped items in the whole paper, and each swap costs the full mark for that point.
| Technique | Answers the question | Instrument |
|---|---|---|
| Method study | What is the one best way of doing the whole job? | Process charts, operations research |
| Motion study | Which movements can be eliminated? | Film, symbols and colours |
| Time study | How long should it take — the standard time? | Stopwatch, repeated readings |
| Fatigue study | How much rest, and how often? | Output measured across the shift |
A Surat mill films its warping operator, cuts three of his eleven movements, then takes forty stopwatch readings to fix 34 minutes as the time for one beam, and finally adds a break at 11:00. Name the three techniques, in order.
If the question had also asked about redesigning the whole warping sequence from yarn issue to loom, that fourth item would have been method study.
Under the differential piece wage system a standard output is fixed by work study and two different rates of wage are paid — a higher rate per unit to workers who produce at or above the standard, and a lower rate to those who produce below it. The wide gap in earnings rewards efficient workers and motivates inefficient workers to improve.
Time study fixed Kaveri's standard at 20 finished pump bodies a day. The bay now pays ₹50 a body to anyone at or above the standard and ₹40 to anyone below it. Ganesan turned out 22 bodies on Tuesday and Murugan 18 — four bodies apart, and ₹380 apart in a single day's pay.
Using Case 30, compute both men's wages, state the gap, and name the principle of scientific management this technique carries out.
Taylor's own illustration: Schmidt at Bethlehem Steel raised pig-iron loading from 12.5 to 47.5 tons a man-day and his wage rose from $1.15 to $1.85 — about 60% more. You will meet this system again in Chapter 7 as a financial incentive.
And do not file it under Fayol. Fayol's Remuneration of employees judges the amount — is the pay fair to the worker and within the firm's paying capacity? Taylor's technique fixes the method — two rates, one either side of the standard. A case about fairness is Fayol; a case about two rates per unit is Taylor.
Write a four-line case set in a Kolkata engineering workshop that could only be answered Method study — not Motion study, and not Standardisation.
Bose & Sons had already fixed one alloy grade and one gauge for its gearboxes, and its fitters' hand movements had been filmed and trimmed the year before. Ananya now re-planned the whole job from goods-inward to despatch — where the castings are unloaded, in what order the six operations run, where the inspection table stands — and cut the route a gearbox travels from 290 metres to 70.
Rangoli's new works head timed the warping job over sixty runs and set 34 minutes a beam as the standard. He then announced ₹28 a beam for anyone at or above 12 beams a shift and ₹22 for anyone below. Within a month the union struck. "He measured us but he never told us what the measurement was for, he shares none of the saving, and the men who fall short are the oldest hands on the worst looms."
The techniques are correctly applied. Something else has gone wrong. Name the techniques used, then name the principles being violated and say why the techniques alone could not save the scheme.
"Taylor's principles are functional foremanship, standardisation, time study and motion study." Four techniques under the word "principles" — and the whole answer goes.
The reverse error costs just as much: writing "the techniques of scientific management are science not rule of thumb, harmony not discord…" The examiner marks the heading as strictly as the content.
Sort all fifteen into two columns — PRINCIPLE or TECHNIQUE. One of the fifteen belongs in neither. Find it.
Fayol: 1 Unity of command · 3 Esprit de corps · 7 Scalar chain
Taylor: 5 Harmony, not discord · 9 Science, not rule of thumb · 12 Cooperation, not individualism
All Taylor's: 2 Functional foremanship · 4 Method study · 6 Differential piece wage system · 8 Time study · 10 Standardisation of work · 11 Fatigue study · 13 Motion study · 14 Simplification of work
Eight items, seven techniques — 10 and 14 are counted as the single technique standardisation and simplification of work. Write "seven".
15 Mental revolution. It is a concept — the change of attitude Taylor demanded under the principles of Harmony, not Discord and Cooperation, not Individualism. It is not one of the seven techniques, and it is not itself a numbered principle.
Fayol contributed no techniques at all. Every technique in that middle column is Taylor's. So if a question says "techniques", Fayol cannot be the answer — which is itself worth a mark on a one-mark question.
| Basis of difference | Henri Fayol | F. W. Taylor |
|---|---|---|
| Perspective | Top level of management. | Shop floor level of a factory. |
| Unity of command | Staunch proponent — one employee, one boss. | Did not think it important: under functional foremanship a worker takes orders from eight specialists. |
| Applicability | Applicable universally. | Applicable to specialised situations. |
| Basis of formation | Personal experience. | Observation and experimentation. |
| Focus | Improving overall administration. | Increasing productivity. |
| Personality | Practitioner. | Scientist. |
| Expression | General Theory of Administration. | Scientific Management. |
Their contributions are complementary, not contradictory. Fayol built downward from the board; Taylor built upward from the bench; between them they cover the same organisation. Examiners give credit for saying so.
Kaveri's board resolved in April to split the company into a Pumps Division and a Motors Division, each with its own head, its own plan and authority to approve capital up to ₹25 lakh. In the same month the machining bay was reorganised so that a route clerk and an instruction card clerk now plan every job before the shift starts, while a speed boss and an inspector supervise its execution — the machinist reports to all four.
Two different bodies of thought are at work in one company in one month. Identify each, attribute it to the right thinker, and explain why the second half of the case would have troubled the first thinker.
Mental revolution belongs to neither list: it is the change of attitude Taylor demanded under Harmony, not Discord and Cooperation, not Individualism. And Fayol contributed no techniques at all — every chip in the second row is Taylor's.
Explain the principle of Scalar Chain and the gang plank.
A diagram of A–B–C–D–E and A–L–M–N–O with the dashed E↔O rung earns credit even when the words are thin. Draw it.
"The principles of management and the techniques of management are two different things, and Taylor gave both." Distinguish between a principle and a technique on four bases, using Taylor's own work for the examples.
| Basis | Principle | Technique |
|---|---|---|
| Meaning | A broad, general guideline to decision-making and behaviour. | A procedure or method — a series of steps carried out. |
| Nature | Tells the manager what to keep in mind while deciding. | Tells him how the work is to be done. |
| Flexibility | Flexible and contingent — applied creatively. | Specific — the steps are followed as laid down. |
| Taylor's example | Science, not rule of thumb. | Functional foremanship, method study, differential piece wage system. |
Four bases, four marks. Two paragraphs with no basis column would lose most of these marks even if every fact in them were right.
Explain any six principles of management given by Henri Fayol, with one example each.
Pick the six you have examples for. A named principle with no example is half a point; an example with no principle named is none.
Meenal Arora, who heads Vanya's new Personal Care Division, may approve media spend up to ₹40 lakh herself; the rest goes to the board. She has her own brand plan, her own targets and one reporting line to the MD. Her team of nine each report to her alone, and she runs a suggestion scheme that paid out ₹2.4 lakh last year for ideas that cut packaging cost. But her four brand managers have been rotated between brands every five months, and two of the four resigned in March saying "nothing we start is ever ours to finish".
Name the principles being followed (any three) and the one being violated, and quote the line that proves the violation.
Ananya Bose spent 2024 doing four things. She filmed the milling operation and cut four of the fourteen hand movements. She took eighty stopwatch readings and set 26 minutes as the time for one housing. She then offered ₹95 a housing to anyone making 16 or more in a shift and ₹78 to anyone below. Finally she called the whole shop together, showed them the ₹31 lakh the changes had saved, and put 35% of it into a shop bonus — "the saving is yours as much as it is mine".
Identify the three techniques and the two principles of scientific management at work, and compute what a fitter making 17 housings and one making 15 would each earn.
Fayol and Taylor both assumed the world outside the factory gate holds still. Chapter 3 removes that assumption.
Chapter 3 will need one idea from this one above all: that management principles are flexible and contingent — that "the application of a principle depends on the prevailing situation". Business Environment is the study of what that situation is made of, and why it will not sit still while a manager applies a guideline to it.