International Steel Group (ISG)
As the day shift supervisor at the steel plant, you summon the six college students who are working for you this summer doing whatever you need done (sweeping up, sandblasting the inside of boilers that are down for maintenance, running errands, etc.). You walk them across the plant to a field where the company stores scrap metal "leftovers." The area, about the size of a football field, is stacked with organized piles of metal. You explain that everything they see has just been sold. Metal prices, which have been depressed, have finally risen enough that the company can earn a small profit by selling its scrap.
You point out that railroad tracks divide the field into parallel sectors, like the lines on a football field, so that each stack of metal is no more than 15 feet from a track. Each stack contains 390 pieces of metal. Each piece weighs
92 pounds and is about a yard long and just over 4 inches high and 4 inches wide. You tell the students that, working as a team, they are to pick up each piece, walk up a ramp to a railroad car positioned next to each stack, and then neatly position and stack the metal for shipment. That's right, you repeat, 92 pounds, walk up the ramp,
and carry the metal onto the rail car. Anticipating their questions, you explain that a forklift could be used only if the metal was stored on wooden pallets (it isn't), if the pallets could withstand the weight of the metal (they would be crushed), and if you, as their supervisor, had forklifts and people trained to run them (you don't). In other words, the only way to get the metal into the rail cars is for the students to carry it.
Based on an old report from the last time the company sold some of the metal, you know that over an eight-hour shift workers typically loaded about 30 to 31 pieces of metal parts per hour. At that pace, though, it will take your six students six weeks to load all of the metal, and the purchasing manager who sold it says it must be shipped in two weeks. So, without more workers (there's a hiring freeze) and without forklifts, all of the metal has to be loaded by hand by these six workers in two weeks.
-Refer to ISG. The shift supervisor needs to motivate the students to work much, much harder than they have been all summer, and they've gotten used to the leisurely pace and job assignments. One of the stated beliefs of____________ was that it was management's responsibility to pay workers fairly for their work, "a fair day's pay for a fair day's work."

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The situation described in the scenario is one that would have interested Frederick Taylor, who is often considered the father of scientific management. Taylor believed in finding the most efficient ways to perform tasks, through methods like time and motion studies, and in paying workers based on their level of productivity. The supervisor's concern about the slow pace of work and the need to motivate the students to work harder is reflective of Taylor's ideas about managing and motivating workers.