Mental Revolution is the essence of Scientific Management on the part of working men to their duties, their work, their fellow men, and their employees. It also involves equally complete mental revolution on the part of those on the management side toward their fellow workers, their duties, toward their workers, and they are all of the daily problems. (Wren 1972:142-43)
It demands the realization of the fact that their mutual interest is not antagonistic and that mutual prosperity is possible only through mutual cooperation. Without this great mental revolution on both sides, Taylor said, scientific management does not exist.
The great revolution that takes place in the mental attitude of the two parties under scientific management is that both sides take their eyes off the division of the surplus as the all-important matter and together turn their attention towards increasing the size of the surplus until this surplus becomes so large that it is unnecessary to quarrel over how it shall be divided (ibid.) because the division of surplus is the root of all troubles.
Scientific management cannot be said to exist, then, in any establishment until after this change has taken place in the mental attitude of both the management and men, both as to their duty to cooperate in producing the largest possible surplus and as to the necessity for substituting exact scientific knowledge for opinions or the old rule of thumb or individual knowledge.
The objective of scientific management is to increase output per unit of human effort. This was possible through the right method, tools, and procedure by trained men. Taylor’s thesis was that productivity could be improved endlessly, and if the productivity declines, everybody, suffers-workers, shareholders, managers, etc.
Scientific management is a thoughtful, organized approach to the job of management as contrasted with the rule of thumb approach. It solves the different problems of organizations based on critical analysis, inventive experiments, and objective evaluation of different identifying alternatives. A specialist manages it.
It develops a science for each element of a man’s work and emphasizes the need for scientific selection, training, and promotion of people working in the organization. It encourages specialization of work and clear-cut division of work between management and worker,; the two must cooperate to increase the business’s efficiency. It thus implies the application of science to the management of business units.