Human Relations Principles

Human Relations Principles

Background

In every organization people are the main assets that can make a company success or a failure. This is not only the case with the organization but also with us collectively. If a manager wants to a department work properly then he will have to make sure that employees working under him are under no stress and are motivated to perform their jobs.

Introduction

At the time of McGregor's writing, there was increasing attention being given to the human and organizational costs resulting from the scientific management movement and the fragmentation and reutilization of work. The fields of psychology and sociology, in particular, produced a number of works focusing on the problem including such work as alienation and freedom and impact of formal organization on the individual. Job enlargement was cited as being one of the emerging approaches to management consistent with Theory Y, an approach which was being experimented with, for example, in a number of organizations including the work at Polaroid.

The work of Herzberg and his dual-factor theory made a major impact on the field and became highly popular with practitioners. With Herzberg's work the terminology changed from job enlargement to job enrichment. The dual-factor theory clearly linked motivation to changes in the job itself including a sense of achievement, accomplishment, recognition, responsibility and professional growth, factors referred to as motivating factors. The importance of motivating factors such as achievement, recognition, responsibility and personal growth are clearly related to the concept of Theory Y.

The relationship between the original concept of job enlargement, then job enrichment and Theory Y, was further strengthened by the work of  with the publication of Work Redesign as part of the Organization Development Series published by Addison-Wesley. In the work of Hackman and Oldham, a measure of job characteristics related to motivation was introduced, known as the motivating potential score (MPS) and the job diagnostic survey (JDS). The JDS provided a measure and profile of five factors related to job motivation: skill variety, task identity, significance, autonomy and feedback. The MPS provided a summary score of the five factors.

Again, a measure of the growth and prevalence of ideas reflecting Theory Y management today can be provided by the number of citations given to Hackman and Herzberg, the two major contributors to the development of work design, again in OD and Change. It appears clear that as the work on job enlargement becomes increasingly refined, it continues to become even more closely aligned with McGregor's ideas on the nature of human beings at work. One of the most important recent advances in job design is the work on relational job design. Although not extensively incorporated into the literature of OD, relational job design is clearly consistent with the values of OD and McGregor, and will in all probability become part of the work in OD in the near future. For example, for current developments in relational job design, see the work of Adam which provides illustrations regarding relational job design and pro-social contributions; and work on task significance and job ...