Creative Impulse in Industry: A Proposition for Educators

by Helen Marot

A resourceful manager in one of the most intelligently managed plants in the United States told me that women were less susceptible than men to the wage incentive. He found that many of them are content when their wage covers a sum which represents for them their personal requirements; that they cannot interest them in trying for more. On that account the manager takes up the case of the individual girl to see if her ambition to earn more money cannot be stimulated. They find sometimes that a mother requires her daughter to give in her whole wage at the end of the week and that the girl has no pleasure in the spending of it; they visit the mother and persuade her to let the girl keep a proportion of her wage and point out to the mother that she is limiting the girl's ambition. They also find girls who have entire control over the spending of their wages, who are without ambition to earn over and above a certain sum because that sum will meet their own recognized needs. The case of these girls the management tries to cover by encouraging them to save for vacations and other purposes which they offer by way of suggestion. In both of these instances the management undertakes to create new wants or ways of realizing wants which were not recognized by the workers themselves. The satisfaction of these wants may or may not be in the direction of extending experience and expanding contacts. But that is neither here nor there. The point is, the manager of the industry has used an incentive for increasing production which has no relation to production itself. He is forced to do this because he fails to make the process of production a matter of interest to the worker. The processes of production do not of themselves as we know compel the workers' application or stimulate their desire for productive enterprise.

It is in the nature of the case impossible to increase the wage incentive indefinitely. One large and scientifically managed plant has made remarkable provisions for staving off the time when the dead line is reached. They have taken stock account of the labor power they require, the amount of energy which each worker possesses, for the purpose of evaluation and payment. They have undertaken to cover as separate items each condition which affects a worker's relation to his job. They rate as separate items the worker's proficiency, reliability, continuity in service, indirect charges, increased cost of living, and periods of lay-off; they rate him according to the number of technical processes he is proficient in, whether or not he is engaged on more than one; they rate him if he attends the night school connected with the factory and shows in this way a disposition to learn other operations than, those he already knows. Why, they wonder, does only ten per cent of the force take advantage of the school and what, they are eager to find out, can they do further to secure the men's coöperation. For "coöperation," they say, "in a special way deserves credit, since it is unexpected … certain well defined acts of coöperation will bring extra reward." Their rewards so carefully calculated did not seem to enlist response as spiritual in its nature as coöperation. It seemed that they had reached "the dead line" where wage stimulus fails to draw its hoped for response.

To get from the workers the highest efficiency the scientifically managed plants pay for a task a stated rate based on piece or time; if the task is performed within the time set and the directions for doing the task as laid out by the management, are followed, the worker receives in addition to the regular rate, a bonus. Mr. H.L. Grant, while working with Mr. Taylor, discovered that there was weakness in the system of paying bonuses, and the weakness was not overcome until he devised a method of paying the workman for the time allowed plus a percentage of that time according to what he did. This method he declares constantly induced further effort and overcame what they discovered was the weakness in a flat bonus. As fair or as superior as this bonus may be in relation to the prevailing rate in the market, managers say that the workers are apt in time to fall below the standard as their work becomes routine, unless the incentive after a time is increased or changed in character. In other words the wage incentive is like a virus injection. The dose is not continuously effective, except as the amount is increased or altered.

A usual method of keeping alive the financial incentive is profit sharing and schemes for participation in profits, but they are rewards of general merit and bids for continuity of service; they have no direct relation to the workers' efficiency and compliance with standards which distinguish the wage rewards of scientifically managed plants.

Promotion, the incentive second in importance to the wage incentive, is of assistance in postponing the time when the dead line for the worker is reached. Nothing better illustrates the limitations of promotion in this respect than the fact that in factories where the turnover is the lowest, the opportunity to promote the workers decreases; it falls in proportion to the length of their term of service. That is, chances for promotion are the lowest in factories where conditions otherwise are favorable to the worker. In the factory where the turnover is only 18 per cent the management says that promotion is a negligible factor. Where the turnover is high there is greater opportunity in plants scientifically managed than in others to promote men, as the scheme of organization calls for a larger number of what they call "functionalized foremen" and teachers in proportion to the working force.

It is as I have said, on account of the necessity of these positions in the general scheme that managers of factories are interested in finding more men who have initiative, than industry under their direction has produced.

Before scientific management was discovered, business management and machinery already had robbed industry of productive incentives, of the real incentive to production; a realization on the part of the worker of its social value and his appreciation of its creative content. All that was left for scientific management to gather together for its direction were bits of experience which workers gained by their own experimental efforts at how best to handle tools. Their efforts it is true were not sufficiently great in this direction to promise progressive industrial advance. The margin for experiment which was still theirs was not sufficiently largo to insure continued effort inspired by an interest in the work.

When we have taken into full account the repressive effect of scientific management on initiative, we may well admit an advantage: educationally speaking, the repression is direct. The workers are fully aware that they are doing what some one else requires of them. They are not under the delusion that they are acting on their own initiative. They are being managed and they know it and all things being equal (which they are not) they do not like it. The responsibility they may clearly see and feel rests with them to find a better scheme for carrying industry forward. The methods of scientific management are calculated to incite not only open criticism from the workers but to suggest that efficient industry is a matter of learning, and that learning is a game at which all can play, if the opportunity is provided.

Scientific managers have hoped that their plans to conserve energy and increase the wage in relation to expenditure of energy would meet little opposition. They also have hoped that the paternalistic feature of welfare work would allay opposition. But I am not inclined to include the welfare schemes in a consideration of scientific management; they have little light to throw on what educational significance there is in the efficiency methods which scientific management has introduced in industry. The playgrounds attached to factories, the indoor provisions for social activity, the clubs, while not having an acknowledged relation to the scientific management of the factory and while repudiated by some managers, are a common feature of plants which claim to be scientifically managed. There are scientifically managed plants which object to the recreational and other features which have to do with matters outside the province of the factory, on the ground that it is a meddling with the personal side of people's lives. "A baseball game connected with the factory," said the educational manager of a certain plant, "has the effect of limiting the workers' contacts; it is much better for them, as it is for every one, not to narrow their relationships to a small group, but to play ball with the people of the town." It is significant that this concern deals with the union and conforms to its regulations. Whether this more generous concept of the workers' lives yields more in manufactured goods than one that confines the activity of the workers to the factory in which they labor, scientific management, so far as I know, has not discovered.

The very nature of the welfare schemes suggests that they are inspired more out of fear of the workers' freedom of contact than launched on account of comparative findings which relate strictly to the economy of labor power. The policy of leaving the workers free, it was clear in the instance just cited, had been adopted out of a personal preference for freedom in relationships. The introduction of clinics, rest rooms, restaurants, sanitary provisions, and all arrangements relating directly to the workers' health have a bearing on efficiency and productivity which is well recognized and probably universally endorsed by efficiency managers, even if they are not invariably adopted.