ABSTRACT
The relations between men and machines, may usefully be thought of as a socio-technical system. The scientific management school associated with the work of Frederick Taylor assumed the primacy of economic motives—that men would seek to maximize their incomes with minimum physical effort. Beginning with the early investigations into industrial fatigue, through the era of scientific management and human relations, to the more recent notions of job enlargement and job enrichment, we have not only a wide variety of theories about the optimum method of organizing work, but also a changing set of assumptions and hunches about the motivation to work, about human nature itself. Managers who accept this tension reduction model of employee behaviour are apparently making a number of assumptions about human motivations. A. H. Maslow assumes a hierarchy of basic needs with self-actualization at the top, and holds that for the higher needs to function there must have been a prior satisfaction of the lower needs.
