Year: 1998
Type: dissertation
Abstract: BackgroundThe impact of a supervisor's actions on subsequent worker performance is not a new concept.Work in this area dates back to the time of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Taylor.Not surprisingly, the pioneers of industrial engineering were also some of the more significant contributors to performance studies.In conjunction with their improvements in systems management, they also investigated ways to enhance performance by manipulating the worker's psyche.They worked on incentive programs to provide an external push to increase productivity.Ideas like piece-rate work and monetary incentives were significant achievements in the early 1900's.It was Taylor's (1911) opinion that output will almost always increase when a work incentive is present.It must be understood that prior to Taylor and the Gilbreths, the idea that a worker's attitude could have anything but a minuscule impact on productivity was foreign.In The Psvchologv of Management (1914), Lillian Gilbreth describes the "incentives" system under then-traditional management as being, at best, vague to nonexistent.Taylor and the Gilbreths both made similar significant advances in the area of worker performance.Today, they are sometimes ridiculed for the idea of offering rewards based on amount of quantifiable work accomplished (piece-rate).However, to get to the current level of sophistication in productivity manipulation, these first doors had to be opened.Positive rewards arouse and hold a person's attention; that is their benefit (Gilbreth, 1914).Lillian Gilbreth saw incentives as a means to boost productivity by focusing a worker's efforts on the task at hand.Just as Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and Frederick Taylor pioneered performance work in engineering, Cecil Mace examined it from a psychological viewpoint.He identified the problem as that of motivating a worker to perform a specific set of actions."[T]he practical problem is not so much that of stimulating a generalized will to work as one of directing
Author: M. R. James
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2281921203