§5.So far, then, as initiative, interest, variation, experiment, and personal responsibility are factors of human value, qualifying the human costs of labour, it seems evident that Scientific Management involves a loss or injury to the workers.Are there, however, any personal considerations, apart from wages, that may be taken as an offset? Suppose that workers can be found of a dully docile character with a large supply of brute muscular energy, will any harm be done them by utilising them to carry pig-iron or to shovel earth under "scientific" supervision? Mr.Taylor has an interesting passage bearing on this question: 'Now one of the very first requirements for a man who is fit to handle pig-iron as a regular occupation is that he shall be so stupid and so phlegmatic that he more nearly resembles in his mental make-up the ox than any other type.'11 These ox-like men, it may be held, do not really suffer any injury, undergo any human cost, by having no opportunity furnished them for exercising faculties and activities of mind which they do not possess and are unlikely to acquire.If then, in every grade of workers, there are to be found enough men who appear destined by nature for a rigidly mechanical task conducted under servile conditions, it may be thoroughly sound social economy to put them to perform all labour of such kind as is required for the supply of human needs.
This is a problem of applied psychology, or of psycho-physiology.Professor Münsterberg, in a recent volume,12 makes a contribution towards its solution, and towards a finer art of Scientific Management than that which has been evolved by business men.For since all industry primarily involves the voluntary ordered application of human faculties to manual and mental actions, the psychologist must be in a position to give important advice in all economic operations.For he alone is qualified by scientific tests to discover and estimate the various mental capacities which count for success in industry, to ascertain how they cooperate and conflict, and how they may be best applied to the performance of the various operations in each process.Attention, memory, ideas, imagination, feeling, volition, suggestibility, ability to learn, ability to discriminate, judgment, space-sense, time-sense, and other mental qualities, enter in varying measures as factors of industrial ability.Economic psychology may, it is contended, increase the efficiency of industry in three ways.
'We ask how we can find the men whose mental qualities make them best fitted for the work they have to do; secondly, under what psychological conditions we can secure the greatest and most satisfactory output of work from every man; and finally, how we can produce most completely the influences on human minds which are desired in the interests of business.In other words, we ask how to find the best possible man, how to produce the best possible work, and how to secure the best possible effects.'13The first of these services, fitting the man to the job, involves a double psychological enquiry, first into the vocational needs, and secondly into the personal ability of each applicant to meet these needs.We must examine the task to learn what combination of mental qualities in the employee is required to do it well, and we must examine each applicant for such work to learn whether he possesses the requisite qualities.
Two illustrations will serve to indicate what is meant.The problem of selecting fit motor-men for electric railways was brought to Professor Münsterberg's attention.To drive fast and at the same time avoid accidents were the requirements of the companies.Fitness for this purpose he found to centre in a single mental process: --'I found this to be a particular complicated act of attention by which the manifoldness of objects, the pedestrians, the carriages, and the automobiles, are continuously observed with reference to their rapidity and direction in the quickly-changing panorama of the streets.Moving figures come from the right and from the left towards and across the track, and are embedded in a stream of men and vehicles which moves parallel to the track.In the face of such manifoldness there are men whose impulses are almost inhibited and who instinctively desire to wait for the movement of the nearest objects;they would evidently be unfit for service, as they would drive the electric car far too slowly.There are others who, even with the car at full speed, can adjust themselves for a time to the complex moving situation, but whose attention soon lapses, and while they are fixating a rather distant carriage, may overlook a pedestrian who carelessly crosses the track immediately in front of this car.In short, we have a great variety of mental types of this characteristic unified variety which may be understood as a particular combination of attention and imagination.'14An apparatus was devised, representing the psychological conditions involved in the actual problem, not a mere miniature, but an adaptation which should call out and test the same mental qualities.A number of actual motor-men were then carefully examined in the working of this apparatus so as to test the amounts of speed and accuracy and the relation between the two.Quantitative estimates were thus reached of fitness in working the apparatus, values being assigned respectively to speed and accuracy.
