Date of Award

8-1979

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Degree Discipline

Arts

Abstract

What makes people work? This question has been of deep concern to numerous industries throughout the United States. It was asked nearly fifty years ago, and today, U. S. industry is continuously searching for innovative ways to maximize employee productivity. About the time of World War I, it appeared that people worked entirely to supply themselves with the basic necessities of life--food, clothing, and shelter. Therefore, it was believed the way to accomplish increased productivity was to have in charge a tough, outspoken, authoritative supervisor. During the 1930s, another consensus was that people worked out of "loyalty" to an organization, and the way to increase productivity was to make the atmosphere pleasant; that is, work on salaries, fringe benefits, and have soft music flowing throughout the facility. As time progressed, these methods proved to have little effect upon increased productivity. Since World War II, a few behavioral scientists, most of them from our leading U. S. universities, have made unprecedented attempts to deal more successfully with employee performance and attitudes, Among the noted psychologists of motivational research and studies are Professor Frederick Herzberg, Western Reserve University; Renis Likert of the University of Michigan; and Victor Vroom, Carnegie Institute of Technology, These and other renowned psychologists have sought to prove through their research that there are better ways to motivate workers in organizations than previously mentioned in this introduction. However, the research shows there is currently a great demand for workers, especially those who fill jobs that require high intelligence, But workers often appear quite indifferent; they are said to be "unmotivated," and exist- ing simultaneously are "poor job attitudes." These poor attitudes too often lead to reduced productivity and to a 2 lack of growth of the individual and the organization.

Publisher

Prairie View A&M University

Rights

© 2021 Prairie View A & M University

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Date of Digitization

9/03/2021

Contributing Institution

John B Coleman Library

City of Publication

Prairie View

MIME Type

Application/PDF

Share

COinS
 
 

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately,
you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.