Insurance, and Sears became importa

Insurance, and Sears became important parts of the U.S. economy and underscored
the importance of employee satisfaction. “The information age probably
began in the 1920s, when Walt Disney, Louis B. Mayer, and the rest of
Hollywood began to build” businesses (Pearlstine, 1998, p. 72). People, more
than strategy or structure began to emerge as an essential component of organizational
effectiveness.
Goals in Conflict
A different slant on the difficulties organizations may experience when employing
individuals was offered by Argyris (1957) who postulated that there were
goals in conflict between the organization’s needs and the worker’s needs.
His point is well taken. Traditionally, an organization’s main goal has been
producing throughput and accomplishing goals. To achieve these purposes,
organizations perceived that they needed individuals who follow directions,
accept supervision, and obey rules. Often, organizations have encouraged
these behaviors creating employees who become submissive, passive, and
dependent. In other words, they do as they are told. The best vehicle would be
classical management techniques that focus on specific job requirements met
through particular job skills and rewarded through material benefits. This
clear “pay for performance” approach with control resting with the organization
would provide the greatest predictability.
On the other hand, most individuals, according to Argyris, want to grow
and develop and have some sense of self-control. Material benefits will meet
the basic needs of individuals, but once these have been met, greater needs
also must be addressed. Personal maturation and interpersonal competency,
which often are thwarted by the organization’s need for control and rationality,
require development in order to achieve individual job satisfaction. These
two sets of needs are bound to be in conflict.
Fundamentally, the “rational/legal bureaucratic” organization spawned by
scientific management creates an atmosphere that is shortsighted and centered
only on the organization. The system, through its tendency to try to evaluate
and control individuals, creates a defensive attitude in people. This produces
in the individual an infantile perspective because it uses fear, control, and
dependence, causing behaviors characterized by indifference, irresponsibility,
and passivity. These difficulties occur because the organization controls the
workaday world, requires a single-job perspective, and encourages the perfection
of a few skills for the good of the product (Argyris, 1957).
Argyris (1957) saw a vicious spiral because management will react to
employees’ attempts at independence with greater controls, as long as the
scientific management perspective is maintained. Workers, of course, will
escalate their own behavior and will retaliate with greater deviations and
indifference. Employee thefts, for example, often are blamed on management’s
excessive concern for control. “Indeed, in enterprises of all sizes and shapes,
72 • Applied Organizational Communication
from shoestring nonprofits to giant corporations, the scale of employee theft
has soared” (Winter, 2000, p. 4D). Labrich (1994) concludes: “Understandably
hostile workers rip apart and sink many a company whose top managers,
whatever their public declarations, take that sort of narrow view (management
control) of their employees” (p. 64). Strikes, hostilities, and industrial
sabotage—especially when they are intended as statements of frustration—
provide manifestations of Argyris’ goals in conflict. Pragmatically, loyalty to
organizations can be seriously undermined through management actions. A
current joke is “the new definition of corporate loyalty is not looking for your
next job on company time” (Labrich, 1994, p. 68).
To reiterate, organizations seeking efficiency, control, and profit place
limits and controls on individuals to guarantee stability and predictability.
Employees, seeking some sense of individuality, react to these controls leading
to escalation in the organization’s use of compliance creating controls. The
vicious cycle created through this ongoing spiral of events creates turmoil,
unrest, and ineffectiveness.
People-Oriented Management
Following the Hawthorne Studies and the various criticisms of scientific management
numerous attempts were made to develop greater people-oriented
management behavior. Rather than focusing only on production, supervisors
and managers were told to make the individual worker feel more important in
relation to the goals of the organization and the specific tasks required.
To decrease worker alienation, management strove to increase participation
in various decisions and to treat the workers in a friendlier manner.
Supervisors frequently were given “charm school” seminars to overcome the
prevailing production orientation to ease the goals in conflict. Unfortunately,
many managerial personnel saw this increased ability to influence employees
as an opportunity to manipulate their employees into acceptance of management
decisions (Rush, 1972). At its best, the human relations school created
higher morale and undoubtedly made workers feel more appreciated while
doing their jobs. However, just as the emphasis on productivity by scientific
management had been excessive, depending on improved morale to cause high
production was also an error. Happy people are not necessarily the best and
most productive workers (Albanese, 1988). Some amazingly harsh criticism
was directed at the human relations approach (Hertzberg, 1968). In reality,
“The overwhelming failure of the human relations movement was precisely its
failure to be seen as a balance to the excesses of the rational model, a failure
ordained by its own equally silly excesses” (Peters & Waterman, 1982, p. 95).
Or, as we predicted in the introduction, humanistic management became a
trained incapacity.
In summary, in an effort to counteract the possible negative influence of
managerial control, organizations moved in the direction of allowing petty
Understanding Organizations • 73
issues to prevail. Comfort won out over consistency, personal indulgence
over organizational perseverance, and so on, to the point that the humanistic
approach allowed individual needs to supersede the needs of the organization.
Top-down control used by the scientific management school was replaced by
bottom-up control, and the results were a lack of productivity for organizations.
As a consequence, the humanistic side of management became discredited and
a large number of organizations reverted to scientific management techniques.
More subtle examples of organizational control operate widely. The use of
time clocks or swipe ID cards, e-mail usage surveillance, piecework, bonus
systems, and accountability with commensurate rewards and punishments
provide control without some of the harsher attributes of a strictly scientific
management approach. Organizations are driven by the concept that if you
cannot measure it, you cannot control or improve it (Lawler, 1996). For example,
with the increased use of computer terminals for many workers, more
than one-third of the major U.S. organizations monitor voice mail, computer
e-mail, Internet access, and individual strokes on the keyboard (Jones, 1998).
Attempts by organizations to control employee’s use of technology returns us
to Argyris’ goals in conflict arguments.
Summary: Scientific and Humanistic Management
Scientific management provided essential processes for the efficient and productive
use of manpower after the Industrial Revolution. This concern for production
remains one of the key variables in any managerial theory. However,
the perspective was limited to enhancing productivity through job-centered
activities that relied on clear and precise controls by the organization.
Mayo and the Harvard researchers discovered an equally important issue—
people’s needs—when they applied scientific management techniques to the
issue of lighting at the Hawthorne Electric Works. The surprising increase
in productivity regardless of the scientifically controlled variations led to the
conclusion that the treatment of people was an equally important variable in
increasing organizational success. As we predicted in the Introduction, concern
for people is the other variable or issue in almost any approach for understanding
how organizations operate effectively.
Humanistic management correctly noted the debilitating impact on
individual performance and morale of relying solely on a production orientation.
Argyris (1957) articulated the basic dilemma between the needs
of the organization and the needs of the individual further explaining the
dangers of a headlong pursuit of production goals on the individual’s ability
to work. Unfortunately, many of the attempts to apply humanistic management
became equally manipulative and dishonest because they were really
disguised attempts to pursue production goals at all costs. But the underlying
premise behind the school of thought that workers must be treated as an
74 • Applied Organizational Communication
important part of the organization, and must be dealt with as people, is an
important tenet of organizational theory.
Human Resource Management
Human resource management recognizes that the extreme reliance on scientific
management or human relations management will not provide an
adequate approach to effectively managing people as a resource. Three assumptions
underlie the human resources approach. First, the “people component”
of an organization is an asset that can be developed in conjunction with an
ongoing awareness of human needs. Second, one of the tools for achieving
this development is a contingency approach to managing organizations,
which observes that there rarely are simple answers. Finally, people are seen
as problem-solving resources that work with other factors in an organization
to achieve success. You should note the c