Follett the giving of orders

New public service

This lesson looks at how workers work – how to motivate, manage, and generate productivity from workers. In the public sector, those workers serve the public and are the face of government to the everyday citizen. We will take another look at Human Relations. We will explore Mary Parker Follett’s descriptions of following orders, David Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” and his theory of human motivation. Elton Mayo studied motivation of employees, and his results were used by Frederick Taylor to create the science of administration. In the 1950s, human relations became more focused on psychology and the empirical behavioral approach. Douglas MacGregor developed Theory X and Y that identified two different types of motivation. Frederick Herzberg followed this with a catalog of satisfaction and dissatisfaction factors that explained employee attitudes and workplace motivators. Finally, in the 1960s, William Mosher ushered in the need for a New Public Service when he questioned the entrenchment of professional bureaucracy in the face of maintaining our democracy. We will look in depth at these approaches throughout the lesson.

Understanding Worker Motivation

Mary Parker Follett

Why do workers follow orders? This seems like a simple question with an equally simple answer, but early studies of worker behavior found unexpected results. Human relations became the study of why simple answers about workers were not enough to understand their motivations. Mary Parker Follett was a social worker who used her understanding of people to begin to examine how managers could overcome resistance when they give orders. She believed that a win-win scenario was required. If managers had a better relationship with their workers, based on social understanding, then workers would be less resistant to doing work orders they didn’t want to do. In her essay “The Giving of Orders” (Follett, 1926), she recognized that workers had their own form of socialization - small groups in the workplace. Managers could not order by fiat and expect to overcome the social norms and behaviors that formed in those groups. Instead, Follett suggested that managers could create a willingness to support the company by creating scenarios for workers. In this way, they would see the value of what they were being asked to do and would be more willing to do it. Helping workers understand why the manager was giving the order, and how it fits into the larger company goals, especially as situations evolved and unfolded and orders change, made compliance more likely.

This social ties function of human relations became known as interpersonal intelligence .

“The giving of orders is based on the law of the situation, rather than positional authority...Follett’s key idea in the giving of orders is that each individual takes a conscious, responsible, and experimental attitude toward the experience, noting the results and analyzing the successes and failures by uniting all in a study of the situation” (Feldheim, 2004, p.345).

Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Studies

Elton Mayo

Follett’s views were complementary to the experimental studies done by Elton Mayo (1933) at the Hawthorne Plant in the 1920s. He thought that by adjusting lighting and assembly line placement (akin to Frederick Taylor’s time and motion studies), that workers would be more efficient and productive. What he found was that when groups of workers were given the option to have a say in their work conditions, for instance being able to set the time when they would get a break, workers became more productive. Productivity was not necessarily about whether it took one minute or two to do a routinized activity. It was about whether workers were willing to put in the effort. And they would be more likely to do so when they were working in groups when they could communicate their sentiments to management, and when they were treated as humans and not robots on the factory line. Mayo began what would become the Human Relations field of study – how employees can be managed, happy, and productive.

Mayo was later criticized for technical aspects of his studies when other scholars raised questions of the validity of the results and their generalizability (Parsons, 1974 as cited in Macefield, 2007). Mayo’s studies used a small group of test subjects and there was no scientific method of selection. Even more problematic was the bias factor. It seemed that those workers who were in the test group felt they were being given a higher standing and could work as they pleased, meaning the test results were biased because the workers knew they were test subjects. Additional scholars such as Charles Perrow (1972) stated that Mayo was substituting one “best way” for many other ways that factory work could be done. Like Herbert Simon, he contended there was no one best way, but many ways to satisfice. Because he was looking for the best answer, he overlooked the complexities of organizations. Because organizations are made up of different units with sometimes competing for goals or interests, workers may behave differently from one another. Without accounting for this in his tests, how did Mayo know which group he was really testing and what those results actually demonstrated? While human relations was deemed important, critics said it could not explain all aspects of industrial production or the workforce as a whole.

Peter Drucker’s Management by Objectives

Regardless of the criticism of Mayo’s studies, the human relations field continued and Follett’s notions about human needs created many advancements in industrial and organizational psychology, human motivation, and popular motivational theories expounded by modern authors such as Peter Drucker (1973). For example, Drucker (1954) created management by objectives that put into place performance management of employees. Instead of measuring and testing their performance, Drucker advocated working with employees to determine the objectives of their job and then measure their performance in achieving those objectives. This approach greatly altered the theory of business management and public administration as well. Learn more about what motivates public employees at How to Get Public Workers to Care about Their Jobs.

Personnel Management

Charles Merriam, a member of the Brownlow Committee, and Louis Brownlow are seen leaving the White House in this 1938 photograph.

“Public personnel management has been studied extensively, from at least four perspectives. First, it is the functions needed to manage human resources in public agencies. Second, it is the process by which public jobs are allocated. Third, it is the interaction among fundamental societal values that often conflict over who gets public jobs, and how they are allocated. Finally, public personnel management is personnel systems – the laws, rules, organizations, and procedures used to express these abstract values in fulfilling personnel functions” (Klingner & Sabet, 2006).

Patronage was a form of public employment that predated the original civil service commission and merit hiring. While eliminated at the federal level, patronage continued to be a popular way to reward political allies at the state and local government levels until they passed their own reforms and were subject to the Hatch Act of 1939. By its definition, civil service is recognized as the absence of politics in government hiring and instead basing hiring on merit.