The replies which I
received from all sides varied from a few meaningless lines to long
documents, which in some cases were composed of detailed reports from
all the department chiefs of a particular concern. The common
fundamental turn was decidedly a feeling of strong interest in the
formulation of the question, which was practically new to all of them.
Whether the answer came from paper mills or machine shops, from
meat-packing houses or from breweries, from electrical or chemical
mills, from railroad or mining companies, from department stores or
from publishing houses, everywhere it was acknowledged that they had
given hardly any conscious attention to the real psychological
dispositions of their employees. They had of course noticed whether
their men were industrious or lazy, honest or dishonest, skillful or
clumsy, peaceful or quarrelsome people, but I had emphasized from the
start in all my letters that such points of view were not before my
mind. The mental qualities for which I asked were the psychological
functions of attention, memory, ideas, imagination, feeling, volition,
suggestibility, ability to learn, ability to discriminate, judgment,
space-sense, time-sense, and so on. It would lead too far here to
discuss why these two groups of characteristics indeed belong to two
different aspects of mental life, and why only the latter is strictly
psychological. The way in which the management is accustomed to look
on their men is the practical way of ordinary life, in which we try to
understand our neighbor by entering into the meaning of his mental
functions and by seeking to grasp what his aim is.
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