Eight Bosses for Forty-Five Workers
Sunrise Metal Works is a Jaipur fabricator with 45 workers on a single shop floor, turning out about 900 brackets a day for two auto-parts buyers. Rejection is running at 7 per cent and 22 per cent of workers left the firm last year. Direction today comes from three supervisors - production, quality and maintenance - each handling roughly 15 workers and reporting to the works manager.
The managing director has returned from a management programme and announced that from the next quarter eight functional foremen will be appointed: route clerk, instruction card clerk, time and cost clerk, disciplinarian, speed boss, gang boss, repair boss and inspector. His argument is that specialisation cut rejection from 7 to 2 per cent in a 1,000-worker plant he visited. The works manager objects: “Forty-five workers and eight bosses.” The firm has no staff department, no formal training, and order sizes that average only 500 pieces.
1. Should Sunrise Metal Works adopt functional foremanship as announced? Support your advice by reference to the size of the unit and to any principle of Fayol that the proposal disturbs.
Read the worked answer
Advice: no, not as announced.
Reasoning from size. Functional foremanship is a technique of scientific management built for large plants where one foreman cannot watch every specialised aspect of a long, machine-paced process. Sunrise has 45 workers and three supervisors - a span of about 15, which is already narrow. Eight foremen over 45 workers gives roughly 5.6 workers per boss, so the firm would add eight salaries and eight sets of records to a shop that has no staff department and no instruction cards. The 1,000-worker plant in the MD's story had a planning room to make the system work; Sunrise has none.
Reasoning from principle. The scheme violates unity of command. The speed boss pushes output while the inspector holds it back; the gang boss and the repair boss give the same worker contradictory orders on the same shift. In a unit losing 22 per cent of its workers a year, split command is the fastest way to make blame impossible to fix.
The trade-off Taylor accepted. Taylor knowingly accepted dual command because the gains from specialisation were large in his setting. Sunrise has not shown that its 7 per cent rejection is a supervision problem at all. Copying the headline (7 to 2 per cent) without the conditions that produced it is not scientific management.
A defensible half-step: keep unity of command, and appoint one quality engineer as staff, advising the works manager rather than commanding workers.
2. If the eight-foreman plan is dropped, what should the MD actually do about the 7 per cent rejection and the 22 per cent attrition? Give the diagnosis sequence, not just the remedy.
Read the worked answer
Diagnose before reorganising.
- Locate the defects. Build a one-week Pareto of defect types and the workstation where each arises. If 70 per cent of rejects come from one bending station, the problem is tooling or method - no amount of extra bosses fixes it.
- Then choose the Taylor technique that fits the finding.
- Method/tool problem → time and motion study, standard tools, standard instruction cards.
- Speed-driven defect → a written standard output per shift, not a speed boss shouting.
- Skill problem → train the 15 workers on the changed method; Sunrise has no training at all today.
- Separate planning from doing without splitting command. Create a planning clerk who issues instruction cards to the three existing supervisors. Workers still receive orders from one person; the clerk supplies the plan.
- Attack attrition on its own track. Exit interviews for the 10 workers who left, a fair day's work with a differential piece rate for the top band, and a fixed grievance hour with the works manager.
Test of success: set two measurable targets - rejection below 4 per cent in two quarters and attrition below 12 per cent - and review monthly. If rejection does not move after the method study, then revisit specialisation, with evidence rather than a seminar anecdote.
3. In an emergency, can a shop-floor supervisor take a matter straight to the MD without going through the works manager? Name the principle and its limit.
Read the worked answer
Principle: the scalar chain, and its escape route the gang plank.
Fayol's scalar chain is the unbroken line of authority from the top to the lowest level - MD → works manager → supervisor → worker. Normally a supervisor's message must climb the chain, which is slow in a breakdown. Fayol's gang plank allows two employees at the same level in different lines to communicate directly in an emergency, provided their superiors are kept informed.
Application here. If a bracket order for an auto-parts buyer is stopped because the maintenance bay cannot get a spare, the production supervisor may speak directly to the stores in-charge (same level, different line) and inform the works manager the same hour.
The limit. The gang plank is a shortcut for speed, not a permanent bypass of authority. It cannot be used to overturn a decision, to conceal information, or to go over the works manager's head to the MD on a matter of policy or discipline. If the supervisor reaches the MD because the works manager is unavailable, the works manager must be told immediately in writing; otherwise the chain loses its meaning and the works manager's authority is destroyed in front of 45 workers.