Fitting the worker to the work: is the measurement of aptitude and the pursuit of efficiency a benefit, or the servant of managerial control?

Hugo Münsterberg, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Great harm is done, to the worker and to the work alike, by the blind chance that throws a man into a calling for which his mind is unfit — the nervous man to monotonous vigilance, the slow man to work demanding speed, the man of one aptitude to a task requiring another. Psychology can measure the mental qualities a given work demands and the qualities a given man possesses, and so fit the one to the other, to the great gain of both: the worker set to labor he can do well and without needless strain, the enterprise served by men suited to their places.¹

And psychology can study the conditions of work itself — the curve of fatigue, the deadening of monotony, the training of skill, the economy of attention — and so make labor less wasteful of human energy. This is not to grind the man into a tool of the factory; it is to spare him the misery of unfit work and needless fatigue. The efficiency I seek is not the employer's alone; it is the efficiency of a human life not wasted in the wrong place.²³

Sources

1. The mill-owner may consider as the best work that which produces the largest possible output. The workingman on the other hand may consider a real improvement only that change by which, without decrease in the output, his personal energy and health are protected as well as possible and his happiness and comfort secured.

   Business Psychology, pp. 204–205

2. It has been found that the most rapid and accurate girls at sorting are not seldom useless on the machines. They press the wrong, keys and make errors in copying the total from the machine indicators to the file-card. On the other hand, some of the best machine operators are very slow and inaccurate at the sorting table.

   Psychology and Industrial Efficiency

3. He would not even be aware that there is anything to know. The soil and the seed and even the plough and the harvester are objects about which you can learn.

   Psychology and Social Sanity

Where the argument is made

• Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913 — vocational selection by aptitude tests, the study of learning, fatigue, monotony, attention, and efficiency in work)

How the argument was received

Münsterberg founded industrial-organizational psychology, and vocational selection by aptitude, the study of fatigue and monotony and skill, and the psychological analysis of work are permanent parts of the field. The sharp contest is over whose interests it serves. His efficiency psychology arose alongside Taylor's scientific management, and the labor and critical traditions charge that fitting workers to jobs and maximizing efficiency served employers and management, treated workers instrumentally, and helped intensify and control labor rather than liberate it. Modern I-O psychology has both continued the selection-and-efficiency program and, in the human- relations and worker-well-being traditions, turned toward job satisfaction, motivation, and humane work design — so the field itself contains the argument Münsterberg's work opened. His own framing (that fitting the man to the work spares him unfit labor) is a real benefit that coexists with the managerial uses.