Taylor despised workers’ free association—their attempts to establish horizontal bonds—because it created too many potential divergences from the plan. He had reason to worry about his workers messing around when not told exactly what to do: they usually had little awareness of what the company needed and no incentive to provide it. His system resolved the problem by parsing the needs of the company into smaller interim goals, overseen by leadership who understood how subcomponents assembled into a whole. As you travel down a traditional org chart, motivation and contextual awareness become
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