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Managers, academicians, and union
leaders concerned with the workplace
are finding that many of
yesterday's sure life solutions to personal problems are
no longer effective because of today's changing societal values, affecting work satisfaction
of human beings in the industrial organization. People are looking for new ways to structure
jobs and to organize work in order to improve economic experiences for the worker, basically
the development of the Quality of Work Life (QWL) movement.
QWL represents a blending of these very real concerns for human values in today's society
with awareness that all individuals devote the
greater part of their mature lives to work, expending
time, energy and physical and mental resources to
this endeavor. It recognizes, moreover, that work is
the chief determinant of an individual's freedom, growth and self-respect, as well as his or
her standard of living. Further, the role of a breadwinner is fundamental to the survival of
the family and society. Society has also begun to realize that human resource well represents
the only remaining plentiful natural resource, and
that both the individual and society can clearly
benefit from their full utilization. Finally, and
perhaps, the most important fact is that
production, industrial growth, and technological advances
are clearly not ends in themselves but simply a
means to an end, i.e., the improvement of quality of
life for all.
The main concept used to explain QWL is that of the `socio-technical system'. It is based on
the following logic – any productive system
embraces a given kind of equipment, layout and a
work organization, but the latter has certain social
and psychological properties independent of technology. For example, given
Longwall Technology, one can choose between a conventional and a composite organization.
The socio-psychological consequences of the two
were verified. It was further suggested by Rice
(1963) that constraints, other than technology, and
wider socio-psychological attachments, must be
taken into account – "A socio-technical system must
also satisfy the financial conditions of the industry
of which it is a part. It must have economic
validity". Thus, the productive system has three
key dimensions – the technological, the social and economic – which are all interdependent.
Yet, each of these possesses its own scale of independent values. To pursue one set of
these and to ignore the others is to invite trouble, if
not disaster. More formally, optimizing along one dimension does not produce optimal results
for the system as a whole. Overall system optimization usually implies
suboptimization along each dimension.
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