Work and Human Behavior

Walter Neff, Walter S. Neff

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351471091
• Topic: Économie
• Subtopic: Économie du travail

Work is a many-sided human enterprise that has been written about from a great many different points of view, representing almost every field of knowledge and almost every level of our social structure. Merely to identify these points of view is an impressive task. The subject of work has been written about by theologians and philosophers, by poets and novelists, by historians, economists, and sociologists, by biologists and naturalists, by politicians, by essayists and journalists. It has been described as both a blessing and a curse, as the chief means through which man has developed a high culture, and as a ravager of our natural environment. Following the preface, and an introductory chapter on the scope of the problem of work the title is divided up into four main sections, which include: The Nature of Work, Clinical Issues, Work and Mental Health, and Some Contemporary Problems Since the first two editions, new issues have arisen that are currently leading to a certain amount of public uproar. The first issue concerns the sources of worker productivity prompted by the current decline of preeminence of United States industry both in the world market and in certain aspects of our internal market. The second issue involves the complex relations between work and mental health, with work being viewed, on one hand, as a factor in the generation of insecurity and mental illness and, from another, as a factor in the treatment of the severe mental disorders. While much of the current published material on these two issues is characterized more by heat than by enlightenment, the third edition includes new chapters in these widely debated areas.

1 The Scope of The Problem

It is desirable at the outset to specify those aspects of the work of human beings that are the primary concern of the present writer. Work is so pervasive a human activity that it has engaged the attention of an extremely wide variety of writers, commentators, and thinkers. Work is also so many-sided a human enterprise that it has been written about from a great many different points of view, representing almost every field of knowledge and almost every level of our social structure. Merely to identify these points of view is an impressive task. Work has been written about by theologians and philosophers, by poets and novelists, by historians, economists, and sociologists, by biologists and naturalists, by politicians, by essayists and journalists. It has been described as both a blessing and a curse, as the chief means through which man has developed a high culture, and as a ravager of our natural environment. Entire theories of society have been built on it, and it has been the subject matter of extremely bitter social struggles, ranging from relatively localized labor strife to major wars and revolutions. Clearly, man’s ability to work, including the complex and variegated social relations that have developed around man-as-worker, constitutes one of those great domains of human activity that—in one way or another—shape the lives of almost all of us. It is equally clear that one cannot enter into all the aspects of the world of work with equal competence and authority. Each of us has his own vantage point—his own particular axe to grind.

The Social Psychology of Work

It will be helpful at the outset if the writer describes his own vantage point, so that his sins of omission and commission will become more intelligible. We wish to approach the problems of human work from the standpoint of a psychologist—more exactly, a social psychologist. We see the ability to work as one of those major human competencies that our species has developed as a function of our biological structure, our evolutionary and cultural history, the complex and varied pressure of social norms and social conventions, and the accidents and idiosyncracies of our individual biographical pasts. From this point of view, work is a problem in social behavior. Like other great domains of social behavior—the ability to speak a language, the ability to enter into enormously varying sets of sexual and familial relationships—the human ability to work is a dauntingly complex function of biology and culture. One of our interests is to work out the relationships between the basic biological equipment we bring to our work and the great array of cultural norms, demands, and traditions that we internalize with varying degress of effectiveness during the long process of growth from infancy to adulthood. In this connection, we need to distinguish between the necessary conditions of the human ability to work and its sufficient conditions. From one standpoint, the individual human being is not born with the ability to work effectively any more than he is born with the ability to make a successful marriage. It is true that certain built-in biological features of Homo sapiens must be regarded as conditions without which our ability to work would not be possible: upright posture, binocular vision, the prehensile hand, a hyperdeveloped cerebrum. It is also true that the adult ability to work is a product of a long series of individually experienced events and circumstances that occur within an elaborate matrix of sociocultural demands, expectations, structures, and traditions. One of our major concerns will be to consider the manner in which the nonworking child becomes a working adult.

Continuing our specification of the vantage point of this volume, we should add that we have a strong interest in the psychopathology of work. Given that the adult ability to work is not simply a function of our anatomical structure, given that it is an outcome of a long process of personal and interpersonal development, it is important to know something about the various ways in which this process can go wrong. It does not take much observation of human work behavior to discover that people work with greatly varying degrees of effectiveness and commitment. There are people who appear unable to work at all, even though they possess at least the minimal physical equipment. There are others who find it psychologically necessary to work even in the presence of major handicapping conditions and who perform their work at very considerable personal cost. There are compulsive workers who are driven to work by imperative internal demands, and there are others who are driven to work only by external necessity or by social forces that they cannot resist. And, of course, there are a great many people who simply take work for granted as one of the given conditions of human existence. However, we will be concerned here primarily with the problems of individuals for whom work presents some kind of major adaptive difficulty, either because of a physical or mental handicap or because of one or another kind of failure in the socialization process.

The problems of maladaptation to work are many and complex. Current study has revealed a fairly large number of people in our society who find it very difficult or impossible to work and a still larger number whose work history is so unstable or erratic that the maintenance of gainful employment can be considered a major life problem. Speaking more broadly, most of us, at some time in our lives, encounter a variety of difficulties in deriving a maximal degree of satisfaction from our work or cannot avoid some measure of irritation, anxiety, anger, or feelings of decreased personal worth. Under these circumstances, it may seem surprising that the vast literature of psychiatry and clinical psychology includes little concerning the human problems of working.¹

Before we can focus on the psychopathology of work, however, we will have to examine the importance of work to the human condition, and we will have to examine the process through which the nonworking child becomes a working adult. Some conceptual matters are necessary preliminaries. First, because our attitudes to work are not something that each of us needs to invent de novo but are in large measure set for us by the special and peculiar history of particular societies, we shall have to consider the various social and cultural contexts within which human work has been, and is, performed. Societies and cultures have assigned very different values to work, many of which tend to be reflected in inconsistent ways in its contemporary evaluation. Second, we shall have to deal with the difficult task of defining work and relating its meanings and functions to those of other human activities. Third, we shall have to describe the formal and informal structure of work-situations, since the manner in which we work is at least as much a function of the work setting as it is of the particular psychological baggage we bring to the workplace. Fourth, we shall try to develop a general theory of the work personality; general personality theory has tended to neglect this particular facet of human behavior. Finally, we shall attempt to describe the various ways in which the development of an adequate work personality may be impeded, thus producing a taxonomy of work pathology.

Work as a Psychological Problem

We have said that work is a social phenomenon that must be understood in the context of social institutions and structures. But work is performed by individual human beings, not societies. Although virtually all human beings in all societies must somehow come to terms with the demand to work, the manner in which each person meets this demand is a problem in individual psychology. The conditions that influence how we work, and whether we work at all, are not only social and historical but also individual and personal. We shall have to consider the latter set of conditions and examine how they interact with the first set.

Within the general discipline of psychology, two subspecialties have developed that take different aspects of human work as a primary focus: industrial psychology and vocational psychology. Although we shall have to come to terms with both these fields, the content of this volume does not fall neatly into either.

Industrial psychology has concerned itself largely with the factors that militate for and against work efficiency. The essential ability to work at all is taken as given, and the focus of study is on other questions: What abilities are required by different kinds of work? What types of work are preferred by people of different education and background? What is the effect of variation of working conditions on productivity and morale? How can we improve the efficiency of the supervisor and executive? What are the effects on work of various patterns of organization in the workplace? Some industrial psychologists have carried out extensive studies of mental health problems encountered in the workplace, although these have been generally looked on as factors influencing productivity. The overriding interest is in work efficiency.

The main interest of vocational psychology has been in the variables that influence occupational choice. What is it that impels individuals to become doctors, engineers, teachers, mechanics, laborers? Can we develop assessment systems that will enable us to identify the capabilities required by this or that occupation? Can we develop early warning systems in order to spot career potentialities, and can we influence the process through which young people make occupational choices? In the course of attempting to answer these questions, vocational psychologists have carried out valuable studies of the development of vocational attitudes. We will incorporate the results of these studies when we attempt to generate our own theory of work behavior (cf. Chapters 7 and 8).

These are matters of considerable interest in themselves and of considerable importance for the majority of people who work. We are interested here, however, in what might be called a prior set of questions. Why are some people unable to adjust to work under even the best of working conditions? What are the life experiences that facilitate or impede a satisfactory adjustment to work? Is there a specialized set of demands and pressures, conventions and rituals, with which each person must cope, constituting a subculture of worki Does it make any sense to speak of the work personality, a sector of human behavior that may be distinct from other aspects of the human personality? Does work involve the possibility of conflicts and dilemmas that are sufficiently different from those in other life-spheres that relatively specialized kinds of psychopathological work behavior make their appearance?

What we will formulate here, then, is a general theory of work adjustment, which will account for the tremendous range of variation in behavior among people confronted with the demand to work. In this sense, the perspective of the writer is that of the general social psychologist interested in the analysis of human behavior in social settings. From this perspective, work is a two-sided process. On the one hand, it is a human activity that takes place in highly socialized settings, and many of its characteristics are only intelligible if they are understood as responses to the demand characteristic of work situations. On the other hand, the ability to work is a consequence of a prolonged period of socialization, during which the individual has internalized (with greater or less effectiveness and with much idiosyncratic variation) a long series of instructions, traditions, customs, and rituals, which together make up the experience background for the motivation to work and produce what can be called the individual work-style.

We should add that we have no intention of limiting ourselves in this volume to purely theoretical issues. An extensive field of practice already exists, designed to help disabled, handicapped, or otherwise maladapted people to improve their vocational adjustment. By this time in the United States, thousands of professionals are providing services to hundreds of thousands of clients who have problems bearing upon work.² During the past few decades, we have accumulated a considerable body of information. We know a good deal about many of the broad social factors affecting employment and unemployment—the vagaries of the business cycle, the consequences of technological change, the effects of racial and religious discrimination, the roles and functions of education, socioeconomic status, and similar societal variables. We have some knowledge concerning methods of guidance and counseling. Much of the latter technology, however, is simply borrowed from the more general field of psychotherapy, and there are some questions the writer will raise later concerning the appropriateness of these techniques for certain important issues related to work. What is largely lacking, however, in this new field of practice is systematic consideration of how any individual develops those attitudes, feelings, reactions, and behaviors that we subsume under the general heading of the work personality. Particularly serious, for a field that is committed to remedy the problems of the vocationally disadvantaged, is the fact that we lack readily available information on the varieties of work psychopathology.

Work and Mental Health

In Chapters, 11,12, and 13, we shall examine the relations among work, mental disorder, and mental health in some detail, but at the outset we want to point to some matters of general interest. There is a two-sided character to the connections between work and mental health. That is to say, there are both positives and negatives. The question of which set predominates for any given individual is a complex affair.

Experts in the helping professions have pointed to a number of positive sides to working. First, work is “reality-bound,” that is, the working person is confronted with a range of largely impersonal and objective activities that may have the effect of diminishing his preoccupation with the personal and subjective. Second, to be able to work in a work-oriented society is to be ’like” others and thus to ameliorate the terrible feelings of isolation and pathological uniqueness that plague many emotionally disturbed persons. Third, in a culture that places great stress on independence and competence, chronic unemployment can only exacerbate feelings of worthless-ness and low self-esteem which may already be troublesome for other reasons. Fourth, people in recovery from an episode of severe mental disorder may find that it is only some form of gainful employment that will keep them from living the rest of their lives in a mental hospital or nursing home. All this is quite beside the obvious advantages of a guaranteed income from gainful employment.

Of course, there are many negatives as well, with some authorities arguing that the negatives outweigh the positives. A great many people in modern society are limited to work tasks that are both boring and meaningless, leading to weakened motivation to work and an unwillingness to commit a great deal of energy to perform it. There are also people who cannot easily bear the competitive pressures inherent in many work situations, for whom success is a dangerous risk and failure a catastrophe. For others, to work means to subordinate themselves to a capricious and unfeeling authority, a limit on personal freedom. As we shall have occasion to note in a later chapter, most work situations are highly social in nature. Working requires not only that one must perform certain tasks but also that one must somehow deal with a variety of people carrying out a range of social roles: supervisors, peers, subordinates, customers, consumers. People whose relationships with others tend to be precarious may find it difficult to adapt to work because they cannot handle its social aspects, even though they may be quite able to perform a given work task.

Thus, work is both a condition of mental health and a condition of mental disorder. Like the family, work seems to be something we cannot do without, but it has its share of problems and difficulties. In examining the relations between work and mental health, we must be careful to avoid being one-sided. For most people, work is neither an unalloyed blessing nor a total curse. There are, of course, individual representatives of either extreme, but they appear to be small minorities. Most of us appear to muddle along in the domain of work without so much strain that we fall apart, but without a great deal of gratification either. But some important elements of gratification are provided by working, and we shall have to tease them out. Other sides of working are less pleasant, and we should not ignore them. The gratification a person derives from working, as well as whatever anguish he may also receive, is an exceedingly complex outcome of an interaction between the cultural, psychological, and social baggage the individual brings to his job and the physical and social demands of the work situation itself. Adjustment to work is neither wholly a matter of ideology, attitude, and motivation— claims for the force of the Judeo-Christian ethic notwithstanding—nor wholly a matter of the conditions of work. Facilitation of a given individual’s adaptation to work may involve tinkering with both terms of this equation.

We cannot, of course, deal with this complex set of issues in one fell swoop. The bulk of the book to follow examines necessary aspects of the relations of work and mental health: changes in the conceptualization of work throughout human history, views as to the genesis of our individual attitudes to work, the kinds of demands made by typical work situations—all this culminating in a theory of work behavior. Only then are we prepared to confront directly the relations of work and mental health generally, a task we undertake later in Part III.

Productivity

One of the great public outcries of the present decade is based on the claim that the productivity of the American worker is in a state of sharp decline. The occasion for the outcry has been the successful penetration of the huge American domestic market by industrial products from abroad. The most obvious example is the successful penetration of the American home market by the Japanese-produced automobile, which now claims some 25% of our domestic market. The result has been what looks like a permanent state of crisis in the American automotive industry, with mass unemployment among auto workers and the closing or underutilization of major factories. Since the production of automobiles is a centerpiece of American industry, there has also been a pronounced ripple effect, involving production losses in other vital industrial sectors: steel, nonferrous metals, production machinery, machine tools, and the like. The foreign car, whether Japanese, West German, French, or Italian, is not the only invader of the American home market. There is an increasingly long list of successful industrial imports: textiles, clothing, electronic goods, cameras and optical equipment, medical equipment, etc. While such an eventuality seems still far from realization, some authorities are currently arguing that the United States is in danger of being reduced to some kind of semicolonial status: a producer and exporter of food and raw materials and an importer of manufactured goods. Of course, the consequences for our political and economic influence and for our standard of living are almost too awesome to contemplate.

The factors governing the productivity of labor are exceedingly intricate, and some lie quite beyond the purview of this volume. However, work is still performed by human beings, even if their labors now take the form of service of ever more complex and powerful machines. It is legitimate to ask, therefore, to what degree the current production crisis can be attributed to factors on the human side, whether the particular human beings we are concerned with are laborers or managers, engineers or scientists, planners or politicians. Since many of the human players in the productive process have competing, even antagonistic, interests, we should not be surprised to encounter much blame-avoidance and mutual scapegoating. It has been c.iarged, for example, that our current economic problems are traceable to a decline in the power of the traditional work ethic, so that workers are no longer willing or able to deliver a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” On the other hand, it has been charged that our problems arise from an excessive preoccupation on the part of American management with short-term profits, so...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the Third Edition
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The Scope of The Problem
• I The Nature of Human Work
• II Clinical Issues
• III Work and Mental Health
• IV Some Contemporary Problems
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index