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Assignment 1
Q.1 Recently, a professor at State University was lecturing in a management development seminar on the topic of motivation. The participants candidly discussed problems that existed in their respective organizations. Problem areas mentioned included absenteeism, turnover, and poor workmanship. The participants managed a variety of workers, such as automobile assembly workers, clerical workers, computer operators, sanitation workers, and even some middle-level managers. During the discussion, one of the participants made the following statement: “What we need to stop all of these problems is a little scientific management.”
Questions
a) What do you think the person means? Do you agree? Discuss.
b) Take one of the jobs in the above case, and show how you could apply scientific management.
c) What would be the human relations approach to the same job you selected in above question
Answers
Answer:
Viewing the man-rope-sandbag as a system means that we should be careful to choose a consistently positive direction of motion (though there are other ways to proceed, say, starting with individual application of Newton’s law to each mass). We take down as positive for the man’s motion and up as positive for the sandbag’s motion and, without ambiguity, denote their acceleration as a. The net force on the system is the difference between the weight of the man and that of the sandbag.
The system mass is m
sys
=85kg+65kg=150kg.
Thus, Eq. 5-1 leads to
(85kg)(9.8m/s)(65kg)(9.8m/s
2
)m
sys
a
which yields a=1.3m/s
2
. Since the system starts from rest, Eq. 2-16 determines the speed (after traveling Δy=10m) as follows:
v=
2aΔy
=
2(1.3m/s
2
)(10m)
=5.1m/s