Examines the perceptions of elementary and secondary school teachers, and school board members, of the school as a work environment. The Work Environment Preferences Scale, an instrument based on Weber's components of bureaucratic organizations, was administered to all the teachers and board members of a small Maine school district. (Author)

Organization Development represents an array of strategies aiding organizations to change towards greater effectiveness and fuller realization of their goals. The article introduces the objectives, terminology, and methods of organization development, and airs some of its current controversies. (Author)

As part of a project investigating how communication within hospital systems differs from communication in other types of organizations, the employees of a 40-bed hospital were surveyed for their attitudes on perceived uncertainty, internal patterns of communication in the hospital, and worker satisfaction. Variables that were studied included…

The Job Characteristics Model proposed by Hackman and his associates postulates that positive personal and work outcomes are derived from five core job dimensions: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback from the job. The effects of the number of workers (work group size) and the number of tasks (task size) on…

Extant research on the relationship between job satisfaction and employee absenteeism in the private sector clearly shows that job satisfaction is not a major factor in absenteeism. To determine whether a similar pattern prevails in educational organizations, a study was conducted of 509 elementary teachers working in 36 schools from over 20…

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to an understanding of the causes of the restriction of women from positions of authority in the workplace. Ascertained is the extent to which the sex gap in authority can be explained by the following three factors: (1) women's qualifications; (2) the attitudes and behaviors of employers; and (3) the…

Several factors associated with increasing discontent in middle management ranks have been identified. One of these is known as a boxed-in feeling or locking-in, which refers to the ongoing feeling an individual has when he has almost no opportunity to move from his present job or when the only position for which he is qualified is the job he…

The social-psychological studies of human relations in industry, which appeared in their most complete form in 1939 in "Management and the Worker" are evaluated from the perspective of subsequent studies and in the light of the many critiques made of the original work. The experiments are briefly described and criticisms of the Mayo human…

As a ready reference for information on health education programs for employees, this monograph brings together four comprehensive review articles which have appeared in the literature and seven abstracts of studies and demonstrations. The articles are: "Health Education in the Occupational Setting,""Health Education in Industry,""Health Education…

Higher order need strength (HONS) has been shown to moderate the relationship between work role characteristics and some traditional dependent variables in organizations. It was hypothesized that employees with strong HONS might be more sensitive to variability in their work environments than people with weaker HONS. This would happen because…

People function within situational contexts, and these contexts define and limit behavior. An organization is a very important context and, accordingly, produces potent forces which circumscribe and channel the activities, attitudes, and motivations of personnel. For this reason, both individual and group behavior within an organization is simply…

The basic parameters of intrinsic motivation to work are explored. Principles are sought relevant to ways of redesigning jobs to increase their intrinsic motivation properties and to avoid task overload and boredom. Coordinated field and experimental laboratory studies are described. (Author)

This paper argues that current theories and concepts of organization and organization psychology as represented in journals and books are inadequate in dealing with major contemporary behavioral and societal issues. The topics discussed in this paper include the relevance of organization theory; the fragmentation of organization theory (structure…

The construct of "organizational climate" was explicated and various ways of operationalizing it were reviewed. A survey was made of the literature pertinent to the classical-human relations dimension of environmental quality. As a result, it was hypothesized that the appropriateness of the classical and human-relations master plans is…