At the present time industry is becoming keenly aware of the importance of employee morale. Management willingly concedes that the state of employee morale affects production, labor turnover, absenteeism, and public relations, all of which can be tran...
At the present time industry is becoming keenly aware of the importance of employee morale. Management willingly concedes that the state of employee morale affects production, labor turnover, absenteeism, and public relations, all of which can be translated into wage. However, the impetus for improving morale comes primarily from a desire to increase job Satisfaction and day-to-day human relationships.
Undoubtedly the strength of the unions has made this need apparent, and the leadership of management feels itself to be in competition with the union leadership for the loyaty of its employees.
That the first level of supervision in an all-important determiner of employee morale and loyalty is recognized,but that a similar problem in present at intermediate and higher levels is not so well appreciated by top executives. As a consequence, most attention is given to training first-line supervisors in humon relations problems. In most such training programs emphasis is given to developing a freiendly personal touch, and sometimes techniques for preventing misunderstandings are considered. Stress also is placed on the desirability of getting men to want to do things rather than to fear not to do things. These programs undoubtedly have improved supervision, but management often feels that a great part of the benefit wears off rather quickly.
While the Taylorists were industrial engineering every job they could find-and not bothering to look around them, the social scientists close to industry were closing in from the flanks; begining to point with glee to what Taylor had missed, the human psyche; and to the costs of missing it: resistance, sabotage, and apathy.
Redefinition of the role of the worker was due to a revision of conceptions previously held. Reexamination of these conceptions was stimulated by the research at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric Company. It will be observed that all these conceptions-the economic, the scientific management, the biological, and the psychological-are oversimplified and that all treat the worker as an isolated individual. The contribution of the sociologist is to emphasize a composite view and to emphasize the worker as a social being.
There is to-day a great deal of discussion and writing associated with such words and phrases as:
a. Leadership,
b. Communication,
c. Morale,
d. Managem ent by persuasion not by command, and so on.
Sociologists and sociometrists, psychologists and pathologists, mathematicians and statistictions, ergologists and economists, anthropologists and apologists pour forth many millions of words a year, the vast majority of them directed to informing business men how to improve their performance.
There is a useful distinction to be made between the idea of leadership as a personal quality and the idea of leadership an organizational function. The first refers to a special combination of personal characteristics; the second refers to the distribution throughout an organization of decision-making powers: The first leads us to look at the qualities and abilities of individuals; the second leads us to look an the patterns of power and authority in organizations. Both of these ideas or definitions of leadership are useful, but it is important to know which one is being talked about; and to know under what conditions the two must be considered together in order to understand a specific organizational situation.
We would be mistaken to regard the communication patterns which observe around the world as no more than a miscellaneous collection of customs. The communication pattern of given society is part of its total culture pattern and can only be understood in that context.
We cannot undertake here to relate many examples of communication behavior to the underlying culture of the country. For the businessman, it might be useful to mention the difficulties in the relationship between social levels and the problem of information feedback from lower to higher levels in industrial organizations abroad.
The treatment of morale consists of defining morale, demonstrating the importance of good morale to industry and, through discussion, developing the point that the leader is a key figure in determining the state of good morale. The factors of mutual sacrifice, participation, experience of progress, tolerance, and freedom are discussed and related to both autocratic and democratic types of supervision.
It can be changed by restating the basic purpose of each business enterprise as to emphasize this fundamental principle of sicial service and by those in authority, both in word and dee, living up to that statement of purpose. Leadership is example. And it is only by clearifying their own purpose to themselves and pursuing it unswervingly day by day and year by year, that business leaders will have anything to communicate to others or can hope to create higher morale in the business enterprise.
I would like to study and analyse, in several chapters, Consideration on the Management of Human Relations in the Modern Industrial socioty .
The aim of this thesis, the contents of the study and the method I have applied are briefly given in Chapter I .
The historical background and forming steps of human relations, verified by different positive studies, are analysed and examined in Chaper II.
Chapter III deals with possible methods to rationalize communication, reports, counselling, morale survey, suggestion system and so on to increase efficiency eucy in the management of human relations.
Chapter IV contains case study concerning the management of human relations. Suggestion system and morale survey are mainly reviewed in the study.
Chapter V deals materially withe various problems, in the management of human relations, which check development of enterprises in Korea, and with the reform measures.
Chapter VI gives the conclusion of the thesis.
Good human relations that persons in management positions exert influence, but the most effective kind of influence may not require the use of power or fear motivation. Thus a supervisor might be made to feel that his position carries responsibility and that part of this respounsibi1ity is to build up the marale of his group so that he will have a happy and cooperative team.
The suggestion system the communications scheme which makes the plan work. Narrowly conceived, it is merely a formalized means of considering worker proposals for technological change. More broadly viewed, it should result in an unleashing of hidden ideas and energies and a transformation of the factory from a system of bureaucratic-hierarchical control to a system of democratic teamwork and cooperation.
An interview may be considered an off-the-job contact between the supervisor and an employee in the sense that the employee leaves his work to discuss something with the supervisor. A time and place is arranged, and as consequence the interview becomes somewhat more formal than a job contact.
To reduce the formality and strain, consideration should be given to permitting the employee to participate in setting a time that meets his convenience and holding the interview in a plece that does not put the supervisor at an advantage.
One way of testing a good interview is to determine the relative amount that the interviewer and the interviewee talk. The person who talks the most is the one who is really interviewed. If the interviewer talks the most then the interviewee has learned more than the interviewer. In such cases the purpose of the interview has been defeated.
The grapevine is the commununication system of the informal organization in business, Typicallv, a business in divided into two great organizational systems-one formal and one informal. The fomal organization is the one usually shown on organization charts, and it is bui1t by means of a chain of command in which authority is delegated successively from one person to another. The maintenance of this chain of command requires an elaborate network of orders, instructions, and reports, which constitute the formal communication system of the business. The informal organization, on the other hand, arises from the social relationships of people. It is neither required nor controlled by management. To serve this informal organization, an informal communication system arises. It is varible, dynamic, and fickle, running back and forth across organizational lines and rapidly changing its counse Hence, the term grapevine arose to describe its meandering, hither and you, back forth, like its vegetable namesake.
Industry needs more adequate measures of organizational performance than it is now getting. progress in the social sciences now makes these measurements possible. As a consequence, new resources are available to assit company presidents in their responsibility for the suecessful management of their companies.
The president's responsibility requires that he build an organization whose structure, goals, levels of lovalty, motivation, interaction skills, and competence are auch that the organization achievers its objectives effectively, As tools to assist him and the other members of managemthe , a presidont needs a constant flow of measurements reporting on the state of the organization and the performance being achieved. The measurement proposed here would provide a presitent with data which he needs to fill the corrent serious gap in the information coming to him and to his organization.