Dysfunctional tayloristic effects of Enterprise Resource Planning systems on employee attitudes: Cases from Turkey and Germany

In times of industrialization; Friedrich Taylor lay the foundations of scientific management over blue collar workers, which would later be called as ?Taylorism?. His approach involved division of labor, supervision, decision making, standardization and power balance; but had some dysfunctional consequences such as alienation, task oversimplification, and decreased self esteem & creativity.In the information age, ERP systems potentially implement the same principles over white collar employees. This thesis involves an exploratory research to find out if white collar employees using ERP systems suffer from the dysfunctional Tayloristic effects.A questionnaire has been distributed among SAP users in Germany and Turkey, and a regression analysis has been conducted.According to the results; implementation of an ERP system is related to an increased level of standardization within the organization, as well as potential power imbalance problems between management and employers due to increased transparency and tools of control and supervision.Higher levels of standardization lead users spending relatively more time on the ERP system to a point where they experience a lack of creativity, because standardization is pursued and new improvement ideas may be rejected due to costs and risks of change. They also get to perform oversimplified tasks, which may get boring over time.Increased control and transparency over employees can potentially lead to power imbalances between management and employees; which may lead to employee alienation, dehumanization and lack of self esteem.Those dysfunctional effects have a moderate impact on job satisfaction. Compared to Turkish participants, German participants tend to experience a relatively high level of job dissatisfaction due to lack of creativity.