PROBLEMS OF GETTING—AND KEEPING—STAFF

In the American periodical Office there used to be a regular feature entitled ‘Employee relationships—right or wrong’. Each month there would be three or four brief ‘case studies’ describing situations which had led to staff grievances, followed by statements of the employees' and bosses' points of view and a little panel for you to tick to show who you thought was right. The accuracy of your inspired guess could then be checked by reading the decision of the official mediator. The details of these cases demonstrated the astonishing number of ways in which staff can react to different circumstances. Study of this variety and its reduction to basic principles goes under the name of ‘motivation’, and is usually carried out by professional psychologists. The results of their labours are given in papers which have such titles as ‘Homeostatic concepts and motivation’, ‘Hedonic and activation theories of emotion’ and ‘Self‐actualization and related concepts’, which are, I am sure, easily readable by other psychologists, but just a little difficult for laymen. However, intrepid informationalists like us, in our eternal quest for new knowledge to interpret, can soon track down the papers which describe the subject in terms we can understand.