This paper asserts that the reason so many high school graduates are functionally illiterate may be that the form of economic organization in the United States does not sufficiently value or make use of intelligence. The paper reviews studies that report both the decline in general knowledge of high school graduates and the promotion of programs…

As part of a longitudinal study of first-term enlisted naval personnel, perceptions of job scope (the complexity and challenge of a job), were investigated to predict criteria of satisfaction, enlisted performance ratings, and turnover. Correlations between job scope (Job Diagnostic Survey scores) and behavior as moderated by a variety of…

Superintendents report the principal's job as overly demanding in light of the compensation that is provided. While the negative aspects of the principal's job are well documented and are communicated to students in principal preparation programs, principals do report a high degree of job satisfaction with their chosen profession. In this study,…

For more than 80 years, jobs in the United States have been designed by people for others. For most of these years, the experts in job design have placed the production technology above the job holder in importance. Since the 1950s, many jobs have been redesigned around new, computer-based technology. Often, the net effect has been to make those…

Interest in occupational stress in older employees can be expected to increase in the future. Among the more widely documented sources of stress at work are those associated with demands of the job. Laboratory research in gerontology shows a disproportionate effect on older persons of increased work task demands. Naturalistic studies also suggest…

This summary report presents an integration of findings on teachers' perceptions of their working conditions, based on survey and interview data from special educators in six large urban school districts. Emphasis is on perceptions of problems related to job design, the highly interrelated set of structures, systems, and processes intended to…

This paper chronicles ongoing alterations to the organizational structure of the acquisitions department at Pennsylvania State University using the tenets of total quality management (TQM). The movement toward reorganizing for process improvement began in late 1992 when the associate dean of libraries called the acquisitions department together to…

Diverse opinions are held by workers, union officials, and labor researchers about the importance of the quality of working life to workers. Major issues in this debate focus on the following questions: (1) Is there a workers' movement to improve the quality of working life? (2) Do workers seek meaning and self-fulfillment in their jobs? (3) Can…

There are many possible directions that can be taken to open equal opportunity to all who want work, especially for the handicapped. Since more service-producing industries are expected to grow in the future than goods-producing industries, and accurate job forecasting is good but must be accompanied by adequate education and training, the growth…

This paper presents implications of the path analysis procedures used to interpret data from a study of urban special education teachers' perceptions of working conditions. The analysis looked at a broad range of factors that could affect teacher plans to leave the field. An overall finding emerging from the analysis was that the same fundamental…

This document contains three papers from a symposium on increasing job satisfaction that was conducted as part of a conference on human resource development (HRD). "A Systematic Model of Job Design by Examining the Organizational Factors Affecting Satisfaction" (Zhichao Cheng, Danyang Yang, Fenglou Liu) reports on a project in which…