Independent work

Employee’s responsibility and the ‘new types’
Employee’s responsibility for job and work group is important for all kinds of employees in the present day organizations. It is fundamental to a present day environment in which a very large percentage of people at work are employees in organizations. But employee’s responsibility is particularly important for the three groups one might call ‘the new types’ though for different reasons.
The first of these groups – It consists of the new type of young manual workers. These people arrive at work already rejected, already losers. Yet, though they are the rejects of the educational system, they have had long years of schooling and have, by any historical standard, a high degree of education. Their formal knowledge may be limited. But their horizon is wide. They are, by and large, not motivated by carrot and stick. They are resentful, in many cases with good reason, because the lack of scholastic success which has condemned them to inferior status does not appear to them a genuine, a true, and a valid criterion. At the same time, they have doubts about their own ability to perform and to achieve, about their own manhood, about their own dignity.
These people need achievement to overcome their habit of defeat. Otherwise, they go forever in a state of smoldering resentment and rebellion. They need responsibility to overcome their feelings of inferiority. They need a challenge in which they can succeed. They are suspicious since every earlier contact with authority has conditioned them to be suspicious. Yet they need self-assurance and security, more than any other group in the work force.
The organization which engineers the work thoroughly is successful. Such organization works out the employee’s and the supervisor’s information needs, by bringing employee and supervisor into the planning process as participants and a resource. And then it demands from the work group responsibility for job design and work-group design, and obtains it.