Scientific Management Scientific management emphasizes scientifically determined jobs and management practices as the way to improve efficiency and labor productivity. In the late 1800s, a young engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), proposed that workers “could be retooled like machines, their physical and mental gears recalibrated for better productivity.”25 Taylor insisted that improving productivity meant that management itself would have to change and, further, that the manner of c