An Approach to the Incorporation of Social Psychological Factors in Work Design.

摘要

Managers have been offered a wide variety of strategies for designing the work system. Emanating from the so-called behavioral science school of management, these strategies include job enrichment or enlargement, job rotation, participative decision-making, management by objective, and sensitivity or T-group training, among others. Unfortunately, the zeal with which these strategies have been promoted has sometimes overshadowed the need for a systematic approach to work design so necessary if optimization is to be achieved. Thus, many potentially effective behavioral science strategies have had a discouragingly high failure rate in the corporate sector. This suggests the need to analyze in depth the assumptions inherent in these strategies concerning the determinants of human behavior. This report contains such an analysis. Employing an eclectic approach involving both empirical behaviorism and cognitive theory, three broad categories of management strategy--enrichment, involvement, and incentive--were broken down into behavioral correlates and inherent assumptions. These were arrayed in a series of behavioral taxonomies. These taxonomies were then employed to develop a set of propositions for incorporating social psychological factors in work design.