It is
incredible to factory managers that workers object to being taught
"right" ways of doing things. Their objection is not to being taught,
but to being told that some one way is right without having had the
chance to know why, or whether indeed it is the right way. This
resistance to being taught, it seems, is nothing more nor less than a
wayward desire of a worker to do his own way because it is his way,
and of course from the managers' point of view, that is stupid. It
is stupid, but the stupidity is in the situation. What does this
waywardness of the worker to do his own way suggest? Not that he has
a way worth bothering about but that he wants to exercise the
quality which all industrial managers agree he does not possess--his
initiative. Now a man who has the desire to exercise initiative and
does not know how to put anything through is not only a useless person
in society but the most pestiferous fellow in existence. Allowing that
he is does not mean that he has not the power of initiative or that he
could not have learned to put this initiative to good use, if at any
time in his manhood or youth he had been taught to use it, instead of
being required to follow the accepted ways of doing things without
having had the experience of trial and error. Schools and factory
management give workers scant opportunity to discover whether they
have initiative or have not.
Mr. Wolf finds that "while it is possible, under certain conditions,
to compel obedience, there is no possible way in which a man can be
compelled to do his work willingly and when he does it unwillingly he
is far from being efficient.
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