Job Specialization And Division of Labor

Job specialization

Design in the work place is frequently seen in manufacturing and assembly line where a worker

focuses on one specific task and ability during the entire work shifts.

According to Tom Lutzenberger job specialization allows significant expertise build up in

specific tasks and the learning and speed of production happen faster. A job does not involve

complex process so it can be taught to new workers. This approach reduces quality control cost

and improves production efficiency.

The downside of job specialization is it tends to be that people can only do one task. They are not

trained to multitask or handle multiple areas of workplace and as a result when a crucial

expertise is lost the process can suffer. Additionally, workers under job specialization don‟t have

a wide array of applicable skills. Many of the workers when laid –off they usually have a hard

time adjusting to new occupations.

Division of Labour

It is a production process in which a worker or group of workers is assigned a specialized task in

order to increase efficiency. It is most often applied to systems of mass production and is one of

the basic organizing principles of the assembly line.

“We analyze a model in which workers must be allocated to tasks to produce. There are

differences among the workers in absolute ability that are independent of the activity they

perform. We demonstrate a unique competitive equilibrium that determines both wages and the

allocation of workers to tasks.

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The equilibrium wage has the property that workers assigned to the lowest „„value-added‟‟ tasks

will receive a „„premium‟‟ above their identifiable contribution to value simply for filling these

least valuable positions.

We examine how the equilibrium wage function changes as the production process become more

specialized and the division of labor increases.” Journal of Economic Literature Classification

Numbers: D31, D33, J31.

Economists since Adam Smith‟s description of pin manufacture have focused on two distinct

sources of economic gains from specialization. The first was economies of scale: the division of

a complex job into many simpler tasks enabled each worker to master individual tasks to a

degree that was impossible when he or she was responsible for the entirety of the more complex

job. The second source of gains from specialization relies on different relative abilities of

workers at different tasks.

When workers differ in this way, the division of the complex job into smaller tasks allows each

worker to work exclusively on the task for which he or she has a comparative advantage.

Specialization theory was devised by Adam Smith. He broke large jobs into smaller jobs then we

would assign each job to a worker.

Reasons for the theory (why specialization?)

This was to create specialized knowledge for a particular trade or task, to safe labour time, to

increase productivity and to create a market between other countries. The main economic basis

that where involved included productivity in terms of amount of input in the company, capital

and opportunity costs which entails the highest value given up when a choice is made.

The disadvantages of job specialization and division of labour included most workers hate

repetition and over production is common during bad times. For example some years back

Kenya milk production industries had to pour our milk due to over production.

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There is increase of loss of skills due to specialization, cost of training workers and it leads to

long working hours. Specialization in every part of a defined labor must be provided. This means

that every individual in an organization has to do his work in which he is employed for, not that

one person performing several roles within the organization. The best example is in EPZ

Company where one shirt can pass through five people to be complete.

Scientific Management School of Thought

This is a management theory that looks into and supervises the workflow; that is how people do

their work in an organization; the main objective is to improve economic efficiency of the

workers who works in an organization, more so labor productivity.

The organization seek ways to better satisfy customer needs and machinery were changing the

way goods were produced. Managers had to increase the efficiency of worker-task mix; its

development began with Fredrick Winslow Taylor in the 1880s and 1890s within the

manufacturing industries. Its peak of influence came in the 1910s; by the 1920s, it was still

influential but had entered into criticism with opposing ideas.

Even though scientific management as a school of thought was obsolete by the 1930s, most of its

themes are still important parts of industrial management today. These include analysis;

synthesis; logic; rationality; empiricism; work ethic; efficiency and elimination of waste;

standardization of best practices; disdain for tradition preserved merely for its own sake or to

protect the social status of particular workers with particular skill sets;

The transformation of craft production into mass production and knowledge transfer between

workers and from workers into tools, processes, and documentation.

Implementations of scientific management failed to account for challenges such as the

individuality of workers and the lack of shared economic interest between workers and

management. We all know that individuals are different from one another; the most efficient way

of working for one person may be inefficient for another.

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As the economic interests of workers and management are rarely identical, both the measurement

processes and the retraining required by Taylor's methods were frequently resented and

sometimes sabotaged by the workforce.

There were many challenges in this school of thought that sought to be addressed, usually after

Taylor had left. The countless managers who later esteemed or imitated Taylor did even worse

jobs of implementation.

Typically, they were less analytical managers who had adopted scientific management as a

fashionable way of cutting the unit cost of production, often without any deep understanding of

Taylor's ideas. Taylor knew that scientific management could only last if the workers benefited

from the profit increases is generated.

Taylor had developed a method for generating the increases, for the dual purposes of manager

profit and worker profit, realizing that the methods relied on both of those results in order to

work correctly.

But many owners and managers seized upon the methods thinking (wrongly) that the profits

could be reserved solely or mostly for themselves and the system could endure indefinitely

merely through force of authority.

F.W Taylor and Scientific Management Theory

Principles refer to Taylor can be summarized into six as follows (Şimşek, 2009:95-98): That

workers and managers must work according to scientific principles rather than working

haphazardly when carrying out organizational activities.

Managers and workers should have a work flow that is efficient for both of them within the

organization, this will result into high productivity. Organizational activities must be performed

in a coordinated and consistent way, not in an inconsistent and incoherent way Organizations and

their methods, rather than submitting low unproductiveness, must reject this and must try to

provide the highest productivity. Each labor must be parted to sub-factors forming it.

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When we define activities which workers must carry out, not only intuition and experience, but

also scientific methods must be used as well. Things should be done professionally, i.e. people

should work under departments to make work easier.

People whose mental and physical skills are sufficient for work being standardized must be

chosen, that‟s to say, the most suitable staff member must be chosen. This is where an individual

is not selected for a particular work because he/she is close to the management but because

he/she is knowledgeable about the work.

F.W. Taylor became interested in improving workers‟ productivity by conducting two

experiments.

Soldering

Taylor observed the phenomena of workers purposely operating well below their capacity and he

attributed soldering to three causes. That is, the held belief among workers that if they became

more productive, few of them will be needed and jobs will be eliminated; Non- incentive wage

systems encourage low productivity if the employee will receive the same pay regardless of how

much is produced.

And finally workers were wasting much of their effort by relying on rule- of thumb methods

rather than on optimal work methods that can be determined by scientific study of the task.to

eliminate soldering he begun to perform some experiments to determine the best level of

performance for certain jobs and what was necessary to achieve this performance. And he begun

by:-

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 Time studies

Taylor argued that even the most basic, mindless tasks could be planned in a way to increase

productivity and that scientific management of the work was more effective than the initiative

and incentive method of motivating workers.

This initiative and incentive method offered an incentive to increase productivity but placed the

responsibility on the worker to figure out how to do it.to eliminate this Taylor experiments of

times studies that is time and motion studies was conducted. The studies were characterized by

use of a stop watch to time workers sequence of motions, with the goal of determining the best

way to perform a job.

After years of different experiments Taylor proposed some principles that were applied by many

companies, thus increasing their productivity.

These principles included were, to replace the rule of thumb methods with methods based on a

scientific study of the tasks, to scientifically select, train and develop each worker rather than

passively leaving them to train themselves, to cooperate with the workers to ensure that the

scientifically developed methods are being followed, and to divide work nearly equally between

managers and workers so that the manager apply scientific management principles to planning

the work and the workers actually perform the tasks.

Conclusion

Scientific management theory brings professionalism within the organizations and if

implemented fully, it ends up increasing the productivity of the organization hence satisfaction of

the customer‟s needs. The modern or today‟s organizations should implement the scientific

management theory. While scientific management principle improved productivity and had a

substantial impact on industry, they also increased monotony of work. The core job dimension of

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skills variety, task identity, task performance, autonomy and feedback all were missing from the

picture of scientific management.

While in many cases the new ways of working were accepted by the workers, in some cases they

were not.Despite its controversy, scientific management changed the way that work was done,

and forms of it continue to be used today.