管理心理学-期末英文论文.doc

How To Making Work Productive We speak of unskilled work, skilled work, and knowledge work but this is misleading. It is not the work that is unskilled, skilled, or knowledgeable, it is the worker. Skill and knowledge are aspects of working .The work itself is the same whether it requires no skill or high skill, a lot of knowledge or very little. To make a pair of shoes one used to have to be “highly skilled.” For almost of century now, we have been able to make shoes practically without skill. It would be no great trick to automate shoemaking fully so that it requires no manual work. Yet the shoe itself has hardly changed. Nor has the process. It requires the same steps, from preparing leather, to cutting, forming, stitching, and gluing. The steps are being carried out in the same sequence, to the same requirements and standards, and result in the same finished product. The work of shoemaking remains the same, even though tools and skill requirements have changed drastically. Only an expert could tell whether a shoe had been made entirely by hand and with great craft skill or in an entirely automated process. This may seem to be quibbling. Yet the realization that work is general and generic and that skill and knowledge are in the working rather than in the work is the key to making work productive. The generic nature of work-certainly as far as manual or any other production work is concerned-implies that work can be worked on systematically, if not scientifically. The first step toward making the achieving is to make work productive. The more we understand what the work itself demands, the more can we then integrate the work into the human activity we call working. The more we understand work itself, the more freedom we can give the worker. There is no contradiction between scientific management, that is, the rational and impersonal approach to work, and the achieving worker. The two complement each other, though they are quite different. Whatever study of work