WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT WORK, WORKING, AND WORKER

Man is not truly defined as the toolmaker, but making tools, the systematic, purposeful, and organized approach to work, is specific and unique in human activity.

The worker has been given less attention.

And the knowledge worker has received so far almost none

FREDRICK W. TAYLOR

Was the first person in recorded history who deemed work deserving of systematic observation and study

Taylor’s “scientific management” has lifted the working masses in the developed countries

DURING WORLD WAR I

He studied aptitudes, that is, the relationship between the demands of specific

Manual work

Motor coordinati

on

Physical Skill

Reactions of

individual worker

ELTON MAYO

Developed human relations, that is, the study of the relationship between people working together.

THE TOTALITY OF

Worker and Working Task and Job Perception and Personality Work community, Rewards and Power

Relations.

HAS RECEIVED PRACTICALLY NO ATTENTION

The Manager cannot wait till the scientists and scholars have done their work.

The Manager has to try to make work productive and the worker achieving.

It might, therefore be appropriate to put down what we know about work and working.

ANALYSIS, SYNTHESIS, AND CONTROL

The most important thing we know is that work and working are fundamentally different phenomena.

But what is needed to make work productive is quite different from what is needed to make the worker achieving.

The worker must, therefore, be managed according to both the logic of the work and the dynamics of working.

Personal satisfaction of the worker without productive work is failure.

WHAT IS WORK

Work is impersonal and objective.

Work is a task.

It is a “something”.

Work has logic.

It requires analysis, synthesis, and control.

The first step toward understanding work is to analyze it.

Taylor realised a century ago, means identifying the basic operations, analyzing each of them, and arranging them in logical, balanced, and rational sequence.

PRINCIPLES OF PRODUCTION

Put together individual operations into individual jobs, and individual jobs into “production.”

GANTT CHART (1861-1919)

Gantt Chart tells us very little about the logic that is appropriate to given kinds of processes.

The output of the knowledge worker always becomes somebody else’s input

FIVE DIMENSIONS OF WORKING

Working is the activity of the worker; it is human being’s activity and an essential part of humanity.

It does not have logic.

It has dynamics and dimensions.

Working has at least five dimensions.

In all of them the worker has to be achieving in order to be productive.

Physiological

Psychological Social

Economic Power

Physiological Dimension

The human being is not a machine and does not work like a machine.

Machines work best if they do only one task.

Complex tasks are done best as a step-by-step series of simple tasks in which the work shifts from machine to machine

The human being is engineered quite differently.

They lack strength.

They lack stamina

Altogether the human being is a very poorly designed machine tool.

Machines work best if run at the same speed, the same rhythm, and with a minimum of moving parts

There is no “one right” speed and n “one right” rhythm for human beings.

Speed, rhythm, and attention span vary greatly among individuals

Psychological Dimension

Work is both a burden and a need, both a curse and a blessing.

Work is an extension of personality.

It is one of the ways in which a person defines himself or herself, measures his or her worth and humanity.

Work as Curse and Blessing

Psychological Dimension

It largely determines status.

Work has been the means to satisfy our need for belonging to a group and for a meaningful relationship to others.

Work as Social and Community Bond

Work is for most people the one bond outside of their own narrow family.

The work place becomes their community, their social club, their means of escaping loneliness, with their husbands at their own jobs and the children gone.

Economic Dimension

The moment people cease to be self-sufficient and begin to exchange the fruits of their labour,

Work creates an economic bond that connects them, but also an economic conflict

There is no resolution to this conflict.

One has to live with it.

The workers needs more than anyone else, to be protected against the risk of uncertainty.

The worker, more than anyone else, needs the jobs of tomorrow.

WORK AS LIVING AND WORK AS WAGE

There is even more fundamental conflict between wage as living and wage as cost.

As “living”, wage needs to be predictable, continuous, and adequate to the expenditures of a family, its aspirations, and its position in society and community..

As “costs,” wage needs to be appropriate to the productivity of a given employment or industry.

America has socialized ownership without nationalizing it.

This has by no means resolved or even lessened the conflict between wage fund and capital fund & between wage as living and wage as cost.

Power Dimension of Working & Economics

People are promoted or not promoted.

Authority is an essential dimension of work.

Power relationships which may affect everybody directly & in his or her capacity as a worker

A need for authority with respect to economic shares.

There has to be a redistribution and an authority to make the redistribution decisions.

THE FALLACY OF THE DOMINANT DIMENSION

Each dimension of working are separate.

Each should be analyzed separately and independently.

But they always exist together in the worker’s relationship to work and job, fellow workers and management.

Marx and most other economists saw the economic dimension as dominating everything else.

Elton Mayo to give other radically different example, saw the dominant dimension as the interpersonal relations within the work group i.e in psychological & social aspects

Abraham H. Maslow

Showed the human wants in a form of a hierarchy.

Maslow put economic want at the bottom and the need for self-fulfillment at the top.

What Maslow did not see is that a want changes in the act of being satisfied.

HERZBERG’S 2 FACTOR THEORY

In Herzberg’s words, economic rewards cease to be “incentives” and become “hygiene factors.”

If not properly taken care of i.e, if there is dissatisfaction with the economic rewards, they become deterrents.

Nevertheless, managers have to manage now.

They have to understand what the demands are.

They will have to develop new approaches, new principles, and new methods and fast.

MEGHA THAKKAR

THANK YOU