Scientific management methods

Abstract

The world is becoming more and more complex, so do companies. As a consequence, the decisions that managers have to make are increasingly more difficult, since they have to contemplate every single element part of society, such as persons, resources, external environment, etc. Decision making process’ goals are quite simple this days: companies try to reduce risks, to increase the probability of their success, to predict impacts and changes with very low margins of errors, in order to be prepared to every single eventuality and increase their survivability odds. Science was born thousands years ago, and it’s being used to understand the world and how it works. For scientists the only way to do this is by having a rational and credible process of study, what they call scientific method. So, it is possible to define two different types of decisions, some as being supported by a rational and credible analysis, in other words by a scientific process; and other decisions by being supported by managers’ feelings, intuition, experience. This research aims to provide deeper understanding about management decisions and their rationality or lack of it, by looking into the subject of business research methods and its presence in management. The research conclusion is that decisions are becoming more rational since the majority of managers are using rational and scientific tools to support their choices. The study also suggests that companies don’t use mathematical and statistical tools as much, which makes their prediction analysis to have higher margins of errors.