Independent work

The third of these groups – This group consists of the knowledge worker, and especially the advanced knowledge worker. Such employee is to be ‘knowledge professional’. This means that no one can motivate him. He has to motivate himself. No one can direct him. He has to direct himself. Above all, no one can supervise him. He is the guardian of his own standards, of his own performance, and of his own objectives. He can be productive only if he is responsible for his own job.
Saving the supervisor
To make the employee responsible for his job and for that of the work group is also possible in best way by restoring the health and function of the supervisor. For a long time the first-line supervisor, especially in manufacturing sector and in office work, has seen his role shrinking in status, in importance, and in esteem. Where a supervisor was ‘management’ to the employee in earlier times, he has now, by and large, become a buffer between management, union, and employees. And like all buffers, his main function is to take the blows. In fact, in the modern industrial plant, the supervisor is increasingly becoming the ‘enemy’. He is separated from the men he supervises by an ever-higher wall of resentment, suspicion, and hostility. At the same time, he is separated from management by his lack of technical and managerial knowledge.
Similarly, uncertain is the role of the supervisor of knowledge workers. His subordinates consider him their spokesman and expect him to protect them and their knowledge area against managerial demands and managerial ignorance. Management, on the other hand, expects him to integrate the knowledge and expertise of the employees in his area with the mission, purpose, and objectives of the organization. Increasingly he finds himself disowned by both, by his subordinates because he is no longer truly a scientist or an expert but has been ‘sold out’ to the management and by management since he is narrow-minded, departmentalized, and one-sided.
Since the traditional supervisor has been losing function, a solution for this has been proposed consisting of splitting the job into a number of functions, and to have different supervisors for scheduling and training, for tool maintenance, and for discipline, all of them acting together as a ‘planning committee’ but each with direct authority in his field over the men. This has not proven to be feasible since there has to be one focal point for the work group. But the functional competences as proposed in this proposal by having separate supervisors have nonetheless been taken over by an array of specialists such as (i) personnel people and quality control men, (ii) maintenance people, and (iii) schedulers, coordinators and planners etc. As a result, the supervisor has been left with the sole function of maintaining discipline, that is, with the function of being feared. The plight of the supervisor has become universal and there is difficulty of getting good men to accept supervisory positions.
No organization can function well if its supervisory force does not function. Supervisors are, so to speak, the ligaments, the muscles and strength, of the organization. They provide the articulation. Without them, no joint can move. It is the supervisor’s job to be in the middle. Hence he must have responsibility, function, and respect in both his relationships, upward to management and downward to the work group. The crisis of the supervisor by itself is the reason enough to think seriously about the organization of the employee and his working. For making the worker achieving, making him responsible, is the one way of making the supervisor function again. In organizations, where employee’s responsibility has been the guiding concept for managing employee and his working, the supervisor is effective. Only he is effective differently. He becomes resource for the employee and the work group.
Employee and work group, in order to take responsibility, have to have an organized source of knowledge, of information, of direction, of arbitration, and a channel for contact and information flow to and from the various experts. Employee and work group also need discipline, though correctional discipline, which in today’s manufacturing plant tends to be the supervisor’s main job, but is rarely to be exercised. But the proper role of the supervisor is not supervision. It is knowledge, information, placing, training, teaching, standard-setting and guiding. It is not an easy role which old supervisors find it difficult, but it is a tenable role. It no longer imposes a conflict of loyalties, (i) between the supervisor’s work group and management, (ii) between the demands of personality and the demands of work, and (iii) between human relations and discipline.
As the resource to the achieving employee and his work group, the supervisor can again become whole. He can serve, in one and the same act and in one and the same role, both the objective needs of the organization, or performance and the personal needs of employee for achievement.