Taylor believed in one best way to do a task, which to this day can be seen in the debate within modern human resource management practice of best practice versus best fit. .
Efforts were made in Britain in order to construct an alternative to Taylorism, which resulted in the formation of the human factor industrial psychological school of thought. One of their first finding was that productivity could be increased by reducing the amount of hours in the working week, thus contradicting conventional worker productivity logic. However, while its purpose of conception was to develop an alternative to Taylorism, the human factor industrial psychology had the Taylorian concept of industrial efficiency. .
The employment relationship was shifting focus away from the isolated individual under Taylorism and towards a human relations approach which was characterized by placing an emphasis on the work group and thus initiatives to improve organisational performance were based on work group behaviour and response. The human relations school of thought viewed the worker as a ˜social man' who desired social as well as economic compensation from his work as opposed to the purely ˜economic man' which was characterized under Taylorism. The empirical base and ideological construct of the human relations school of thought has its origins in the human factor and anthropological phases of the Hawthorn program. .
Technological advancements have caused the employment relationship to evolve as explained by Woodward (1965) who employs the concept of a socio-technical system in order to analyse various forms of production system and associated worker behaviour. Rose (1988) reiterates Woodward's (1965) findings, stating that, "the effectiveness of a firm relates to the fit between its production system and its formal organisation and not to the leadership style of supervisors or to participative, interlocking teams ".