Work Redesign

Background

In traditional approaches, management and work organization are highly bureaucratic. The workplace is part of a hierarchical chain of authority, and communication is primarily top-down. A relatively rigid division of labor compartmentalizes functions into separate departments and fragments jobs into narrow tasks. For low-level workers, jobs are often dull and repetitive, lacking scope for intellectual challenge, creativity, and independent action. Formal rules govern relations among persons and functions. Workers receive training and information on the broader business on a “need-to-know” basis. Workers perform their prescribed tasks without knowing much about how they fit into the larger picture of the organization's operation; they are cogs in the organizational machine. This “machine bureaucracy” model reached its purest form in assembly-line mass production work. It is also recognizable in the works of both Max Weber and Frederick W. Taylor, who left deep imprints on management thinking.

The first organized criticism within management theory came from the human relations school, prominent from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Human relations argued that authoritarian management styles and restrictions on the formation of informal social groups among frontline workers were counterproductive because they led to dissatisfaction and reduced work effort. Recommended changes included more democratic supervision, two-way communication in the form of consultation and suggestion systems, symbolic forms of employee recognition, and fostering community feeling among informal groups of co-workers and between workers and management. Human relations believed that emotional and social needs motivated workers, whereas money was not very important. Improving the organizational tone and workers' job satisfaction [Page 994]would increase productivity through its effects on morale, work effort, and cooperation.

Beginning in the late 1940s, other critics of conventional management expressed dissatisfaction with the human relations school and it faded. Although differing in important respects, critics shared the view that human relations workplace reforms were quite modest and often manipulative in trying to persuade workers they had more workplace influence than was the case. Human relations placated workers with inexpensive symbols of recognition rather than with wage increases. Most seriously, human relations never addressed the Taylorized character of job tasks and acquired a reputation as a social engineering technique that sought to adjust workers to the existing factory system rather than change work tasks to better reflect human needs. Attempts to improve job satisfaction seemed hollow as long as the basic causes, meaningless and alienating job duties and traditional authority structures, remained unaddressed. The critics themselves were divided sharply between those who recommended work redesign, often using humanistic psychology as a theoretical foundation, and those who considered work redesign to be merely an updated form of human relations with all of the same limitations, drawing on either critical Weberian or Marxian traditions.

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