PSYCHOLOGY AND INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCY
By Harold Ernest Burtt, '11, Professor of Psychology at The Ohio State University. New York, D. Appleton and Company. 1929. pp. xviii, 395.
In this volume the author has achieved two purposes. He has written a teachable text book for college students, and at the same time he has supplied business men with an interesting, practical, and intelligible book containing suggestions that psychology can contribute to the problem of promoting the efficiency of employees and securing their cooperation and good will. This volume does not enter into the initial selection of employees —the subject of the author's "Principles of Employment Psychology," published a few years ago, nor does it discuss advertising and selling. The business of this book is "industrial efficiency," which, as here treated, considers workers from the time that they start on their jobs, and ascertains what can be done to train them to greater accuracy and speed, how they can be spared unnecessary fatigue, monotony and accidents, and how their satisfaction and morale may be promoted. Abundant foot notes indicate the experimental and other technical literature upon which the suggestions are based, and so furnish a working bibliography for those who may wish to read further upon the subjects treated.
The scope and spirit of the book can best be shown by a quotation from the opening chapter: "The need for industrial psychology scarcely requires emphasis. Any one scrutinizing an industry from a scientific standpoint can easily see many ways in which consideration of the human factor would promote efficiency. He will note new employees receiving a cold reception in the employment office and reporting to the job with a grouch. He will see them struggling along, trying to tighten the chuck or remove a pinion when they lack adequate information about the operation and nobody takes pains to show them. He will observe others doing a job by an ineffective method, wasting motion and energy with the parts arranged in the wrong way. He will find others trying to function with the bench or desk piled high with materials past, present and future. He will notice workers slowing down and very evidently tired in uncomfortable postures, making unnecessary decisions or working for too long a spell without rest. He will find still others doing very repetitive types of work and some of them distinctly bored and unhappy with the monotonous grind. He may note some attempting to work with a distracting source of illumination in front of their eyes or trying to make delicate adjustments in a comparatively dark spot after looking at a bright window. Others may be working in a room that is uncomfortable as regards temperature and humidity. If he looks more closely and talks with workers, he will discover all sorts of dissatisfaction and unrest. Some will be jealous of their superiors, others will be worried about unemployment or old age or some industrial hazard, others will dislike their fellow workers, and some may be actually psychopathic. The remedy in many cases such as these is psychological. Learning, fatigue, monotony, environment, and morale all involve psychological factors." The points to which allusion is here made, are, with many others, elaborated in detail in succeeding chapters.
Professor Burtt has avoided topics of psychological and metaphysical controversy. Probably there is little or nothing that he says that would not be equally acceptable to behaviorists, introspectionists, Gestalt, individual, and self psychologists, Freudians, and other schools. It is encouraging to observe that, in the practical problems of business efficiency, the differences between these schools can be neglected. There is evidently a larger amount of agreement among all contemporary psychologists, when it comes to practical matters, than some of us had realized. If psychologists in future devote more attention to practical problems and experimental verifications, perhaps the controversies will either disappear or prove to be of subordinate importance.
