The 'Human Factor':

...This statement does more than William Whyte Jr.'s excessively ideological analysis in The Organization Man to explain the current addiction of American corporations to a myriad of "upgrading" activities—from "consultative supervision" on the assembly line and at the filing cabinet, to role-playing seminars for aspiring executives...

...As one of the deans of the profession in the United States, Spates provides in his book the most articulate and definitive rationale available of this extraordinary aspect of contemporary American organizational life...

...By reducing all industrial friction to personal psychological problems of faulty communication or unconscious feeling, personnel administration slickly ignores the substantive differences of interest and ideology that underlie industrial conflict...

...and some are corrupted by faults that could be corrected in the social and economic structure of American industry...

...These are simply factors of hygiene—safeguards against severe dissatisfaction resulting in withdrawal or profound hostility...

...To elicit excellence beyond the merely adequate, however, Herzberg found that the work, regardless of its conditions, must contain certain objective elements that make it worthwhile and humanly satisfying in itself...

...Explaining the move, Henry Ford II said the company had gone as far as possible in increasing production by mechanizing its plant and facilities—the next step would have to be the raising of "human achievement...

...He traces the history of personnel administration from the early pioneers, who turn out to be mostly enlightened corporation executives who "demonstrated that it was profitable as well as proper to treat employees as human beings," through the Depression period of Government and trade union pressure, to the current programs of corporate leadership development...

...Great is work," says the Talmud, "for it honors the workman...

...Satisfaction or dissatisfaction, his study revealed, follow from different stimuli...

...Reviewed by Roland Gors Several years ago the Ford Motor Company decided to invest half a million dollars in research into human relations...

...Spates does not mention the most promising approaches to these problems, such as the idea of job enlargement—reversing the division of labor by building one complex, challenging job out of several routine ones, or the experiments of several European countries with genuine worker participation in business management...

...Frederick Herzberg, who has recently surveyed the entire literature on how people feel about their work, as well as conducted his own investigations of job motivation and satisfaction...

...It is an acute symptom of the peculiar hodge-podge of spiritual paternalism and subtle profiteering inherent in this whole movement...

...Even more surprising, he shows no awareness of the devastating research results of Dr...

...Personnel administration is "one of the finest and most comprehensive of all the arts" its task, "to solve problems of human existence...

...Social science thus confirms intuition in affirming the simple fact that different kinds of work can be evaluated objectively quite apart from the workers "adjustment" to its conditions...

...Since productive efficiency is still assumed to be the unquestionable goal of private enterprise, there is only one thing to do after it has been raised to maximum pitch through technology: increase it still further by working on the "human factor...

...The theme of Spates' book is progress: A central chapter called "The Big Change" lauds the benign transformation which has overtaken the world of work since 1913...

...Thomas Spates, formerly vice president of General Foods, and currently professor emeritus of this sort of thing at Yale, has written a brief but authoritative survey of the "profession" of personnel administration...

...On these grounds, he attacks recent criticism of the suffocating hug of the large corporation as "analogous to deploring the spread of the principles of democracy and of the JudeoChristian religion...

...I have quoted Spates' own words extensively because his pretentious arrogance is more than a stylistic infelicity...

...The payoff of these analyses is to show that " American workers, prefer good personnel administration to unionism...

...This means that excellent work does not follow from improved supervision, administration, working conditions, etc...

...Many jobs are dirty, degrading and physically exhausting...

...Although he repeatedly refers to the deep spiritual conviction (he italicizes it for absurd emphasis) which inspired the improvements in working conditions, even Spates is forced to admit that "by far the most powerfully persuasive and pervasive influence in getting the enhancement of human values at the places where people work, has been economic pressure resulting from the natural play of economic forces, the compulsion of legislation, and the bargaining of organized labor...

...After summarizing the historical development of the movement, Spates ranges widely over current problems in the field, covering general questions such as the relationship of morale to productivity, as well as particular issues such as the implications of the steel strikes...

...others serve no useful social purpose...

...Similarly, it glosses over the genuine qualitative differences between jobs...

...The "human relations approach" will fulfill Spates' extravagant encomium only when it stops offering to show "how to combine high morale with maximum efficiency," and turns to basic questions of how the world of work, which is with startling suddenness coming under our control for the first time, can be shaped and directed to meet the needs of individual human beings...

...Herzberg concluded that the basic assumption of conventional personnel work—that the key to high motivation lies in eliminating the causes of discontent —is fallacious...