Direction: Read the following passage carefully and answer the questions correctly. Middle-level managers, such as department heads and workshop directors, can still earn bonuses in about 80% of the factories surveyed. It is the middle managers who are usually the experts because of their formal education and training. (By contrast the director of a factory is likely to be more read than expert, and the vice-
directors are typically somewhere between reads and experts). For middle managers to earn bonuses, the fulfilment of certain enterprise targets is a required condition at only about 20% of the factories; they are more commonly educated for their “contrubutions” rather than on the basis of overall enterprise performance.
Where enterprise targets have to be fulfilled for bonuses to be paid, in most cases profit is not the only success indicator. Quantity and value of production, sales, production costs, labour productivity and/or quality are other key success indicators at various enterprises.
During the past few years, vice-directors and party secretaries have not been eligible to receive bonuses at any enterprises. Can top level enterprise managers (or middle managers, too, for that matter) be adequately motivated over time to perform efficiently without bonuses? I doubt it. At present there seems to be considerable dedication, zeal, patriotism, and other non-material stimuli motivating many of them to do the best job they can. But these stimuli cannot do the job alone for long.
Compounding the difficulty is the fact that salaries, powers and living conditions of top managers are relatively low in relation to those of their subordinates.
Just as a non-manager is dependent on his boss for motivational opportunities, so is the manager dependent on his boss for conditions of motivation which have meaning at his level. since the motivation of an employee at any level is strongly related to the supervisory style of his immediate boss, sound motivation patterns must begin at the top. Being closer to the policy making level; the manager has more opportunity to understand and relate his work to company goals. However, high position alone does not guarantee motivation or self-realisation.
Motivation for the manager, as well as the non- manager, is usually both a consequence and symptom of effective job performance. Job success is dependent on cyclic conditions created by inter-personal competence, meaningful goals and helping systems. After sustained conditions in the developing cycles, an individual has amazing capacity and incentive to be retained in it. Moreover, if forced into the reductive cycle, unless he has pathological needs to remain there, organisational conditions must be remarkably and consistently bad to suppress his return to the developmental cycle. Sustained confinement of a large percentage of the work force in the reductive cycle is symptomatic of organisational illness. It usually is a culmination of a chain of events beginning with management, and is reversible only by changes at the top. Consequences of reductive conditions, such as militant unionism and other forms of reactive behaviour, usually provoke management in defensive and manipulative behaviour which only reinforces that reductive cycle. The vicarious pleasure sought by the rank and file through seeing the management giant felled by their union is a poor substitute for the
self-actualisation of being a whole person doing a meaningful job, but, in the absence of motivational opportunities, it is understandable compromise.
The seeds of concerted reactive behaviour are often brought to the job from broadly shared frustrations arising from social injustice, economic deprivation and moral decadence either to sprout in a reductive climate, or become infertile in a developmental climate. Hence the unionisation of a work group is usually precipitated by management failure to provide opportunities for employees to achieve personal goals through the achievement of organisational goals. Organisations survive these failures only because most other companies are equally handicapped by the same failure.
Management failures in supervision do not, of course, stem from intentional malice. They may result, in part, from a lingering tradition of “scientific management” which fractionated tasks and “protected” employees from the need to think and perpetrated management systems based on automation conformity. But more often, such failure stem from the manager’s insensitivity to the needs and perceptions of others, particularly from his inability to see himself as others see him.
Insensitivity or the inability to emphathise is manifested not only as interpersonal incompetence, but also as the failure to provide meaningful goals, the misuse of management systems, or a combination of both. Style of supervision, then, is largely an expression of the personal characteristics and mental health of the manager and his potential for inducing developmental or reductive cyclical reactions.
1. Managers and other employees are most often dependent upon whom for their motivation?
a) Their immediate boss
b) Owners of the firms
c) Their union
d) Their fellow-workers
2. A reductive cycle is one in which.
a) an employer attempts to reduce costs
b) the work-force is gradually reduce in number
c) costs decreases as a firm gain experience
d) there is less productive effort on the part of employees
Sol:
There are two clues: (i) “reductive cycle” is seen
as a contrast to “developmental cycle”, and (ii)
“reductive conditions” are associated with
“militant unionism”, etc, which are hindrances for
“productive effort.”
3. The passage indicates that unionization of a work group is most commonly brought about by management’s failure to provide
a) opportunities for the workers to realize individual objectives by way of
group objectives
b) opportunities for the workers to achieve a feeling of self-identification.
c) more pleasant working surroundings including modern conveniences available both at their work and during rest periods and lunch periods.
d) greater fringe benefits including more holidays and health insurance.
Sol:
See the second sentence of the sixth paragraph:
“personal goals” are the same as “individual
objectives” while “organisational goals” mean
“group objectives”.
