Occupational Stress and Work Reform: A New Research Strategy

Abstract

The industrial psychologists who achieved fame in the 1960s with theories of worker motivation offered few insights that had not been developed before the depression of the 1930s. For example, the advocates of participative management of the mid 1970s restated arguments that reach back to the early part of the century. The much publicised achievements of the Volvo and Saab plants in Sweden are, in part, the result of ideas and practices adopted by General Motors and other American companies in the Second World War, when shortages of supervisors and engineers forced radical changes to managerial assumptions and practices. After the war, however, manuacturers reverted to their traditional managerial practices and we have followed them in their assumptions.

By the late 1970s, however, it had become obvious to many business executives that concerns for, and improvements to, employees' levels of job satisfaction had not improved productivity or reduced industrial con flict.