• A dramatic rise in the educational level of the work force since World War II has led to higher aspirations and expectations.
• Equal rights movements have made women, blacks, and other disadvantaged minorities increasingly dissatisfied with routine jobs that offer little opportunity for satisfaction and growth.
• New technology, while it has eliminated many dull and tedious jobs, has at the same time reduced opportunities for initiative and flexibility in some types of work.
• The growth of large firms has increased the bureaucratization of many work environments in the private sector as well as in government.
• Years of affluence preceding the crises created a widespread feeling of economic security that led a greater number of people to think more seriously about self-fulfillment from work. At the same time, businesses, concerned about lagging productivity, spent more money on experiments involving the human side of enterprise. Pragmatic business leaders sometimes sounded like social critics or philosophers in making work more interesting for workers.
What is meant by the terms quality of life in work or quality of working life? Essentially, they are terms of convenience that mean what the users want them to mean (which isn't always clear). A fairly inclusive definition suggests that the terms embrace three types of concerns:
• One is the nature of the job itself: Is it repetitive, routine, with little opportunity for improvement? Or does it offer some measure of independence, satisfaction, and future growth?
• A second is the nature of the organizational structure and social environment in which the work is performed. What is the firm's managerial style? What is the role of the union in the work setting and the relationship between management and the union? How responsive is the firm to suggestions for improving training, for opportunities for minorities, for flexibility in work scheduling, for social services, and so on.
• A third is the nature of the job setting or the physical factors of the job environment such as light, temperature, convenience of layout, safety, and freedom from toxic substances, stress, and other threats to health.
A more inclusive definition would cover pay, job security, and pensions all aspects of employment that affect a worker's sense of well being.
Much of the discussion on quality of working life has seemed to focus on the issues of work redesign and worker participation. While these two issues may be the most interesting ones for social scientists to study, they are not the only relevant concerns for workers or managers.
The volume of literature on this subject is extensive, and it varies enormously in quality and point of view. Much of it is inconclusive. The purpose of the following discussion is to highlight some of the issues in a way that will be useful to managers who feel the need to remain open-minded yet skeptical on many of the subjects considered. A great deal of research is continuing, especially on the questions of job redesign, worker participation, and labor management cooperation-including demonstration programs in various work-places, new experiments, conferences and studies at a number of universities.
Two important aspects of the quality of working life, sometimes overlooked, need to be stressed as a prelude to the discussion that follows. One has to do with relationship between stress originating in the work environment and stress originating in the general environment. The other has to do with the nature of worker satisfaction itself: to what extent is it possible to generalize about desirable and undesirable workplace environments and workers' responses to them.
Thus, even if all the problems of the workplace were solved, the broader problems of future shock would affect workers. Worker alienation might well be induced by non-work causes even among those who enjoy a work setting judged to be excellent. This interdependence of the work environment and the general environment helps suggest why job redesign, environmental improvements on the job, etc., may have far different effects in differing situations. The efficacy of workplace changes in restoring physical and mental health of the worker will depend in part on the nature of the worker's adjustment to the general environment outside the workplace.
As for the nature of worker satisfaction itself, the following consideration should be kept in mind. Managers who read the literature on quality of work today could easily be lulled into thinking that someone had succeeded in arraying pros and cons of work environments in some order of importance or priority-that there is some way of telling, on the average, whether autonomy on the job is worth more or less than, say, intrinsically interesting work that offers little discretion, for example. Or they might conclude that if worker participation is desirable in general, it is eagerly sought by all workers. None of these inferences are warranted. A work environment congenial to some workers is not necessarily congenial to all." Goals vary among workers. The quest for greater responsibility or participation is not universal.
These elements of individual differences, uncertainty underlie much of the case for recommendations urging diversity and flexibility in working arrangements. Most aspects of what we call quality of life in work are indeterminate; they are not susceptible or measurement; and they are not the same tor all work situations or all individuals. Thus, the applicability of the results of one type of work-setting experiment is limited, and within any work situation individual responses will vary.