Part One Understanding the Supervisor’s Role
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employees do their “commuting” by telephone or computer hookups. Many of these workers are engaged in computer-related work. Other telecommuters perform art and design work, or are sales representatives. Employees who are difficult to supervise because of their mobility include expediters, coordinators, sales representatives, repair technicians, and garbage collectors.
Decline of the Work Ethic. In recent years there appears to have been a decline in the belief that hard-work is a good thing in itself. Fewer people, particularly among production and clerical workers, believe that hard work is a way of achieving dignity and self-respect. Many young people decrease their effort when working at jobs they consider undesirable for physical or psychological reasons. Many of the people who have not shown a complete disregard for the work ethic are still choosy about the type of work they are willing to perform.
In the extreme, the changing work ethic has been blamed for the rising number of imported manufactured goods in the United States and Canada. The argument is that if North America’s production workers were more productive, goods would cost less. Consequently countries such as Japan and Taiwan-where the work ethic is still strong-would not be at such a competitive advantage in the United States and Canada.
Rising Expectations. Another significant factor affecting the supervisory job is the rising expectations of employees. People want more and more of their needs satisfied on the job. Workers are making demands upon managers at all levels, as summarized by a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare report:¹°
What the workers most, as more than 100 studies in the past 20 years show, is to become masters of their immediate environments and to feel that their work and they themselves are important ─ the twin ingredients of self-esteem. Workers recognize that some of the dirty jobs can be transformed only into the merely tolerable, but the most oppressive features of work are felt to be avoidable: constant supervision and coercion, lack of variety, monotony, meaningless tasks, and isolation. An increasing number of workers want more autonomy in tackling their tasks, greater opportunity for increasing their skills, rewards that are directly connected to the intrinsic aspects of work, and greater participation in the design of work and formulation of their tasks.
¹°Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Work in America, quoted in Brown, “Rethinking the Supervisory Role,” p 5. An updating of the same theme is found in Philip C. Grant, “Why Employee Motivation Has Declined in America,” Personnel Journal, December 1982, pp. 905-8.
