BIOLOGY IN HUMAN AFFAIRS 



characteristics of effective supervision. Indeed, a system- 

 atic effort is now being made, through a program of em- 

 ployee interviewing and a new type of supervisory training, 

 to extend throughout the works to all the 40,000 employees 

 some of the benefits that were first brought clearly to 

 light in this modest experiment. Here, as in many scientific 

 researches, the unexpected by-products have far exceeded 

 in value the direct returns, important as those have been. 



Gradually industry is realizing the great potentialities of 

 such experiments as these. Management is carrying over 

 into the realm of human behavior the same scientific ideals 

 that it has long demanded of the chemist, the metallurgist, 

 and the engineer. In so doing, it has taken steps toward the 

 development of a well-rounded industrial psychology. 



Kelation of Industrial Psychology to Allied Fields. The aims 

 of industrial psychology have a great deal in common with 

 those of the mental hygiene movement on the one hand, 

 and of scientific management on the other. When a psy- 

 chiatrist approaches the personnel problems of a vast 

 mercantile organization, he is not only plunged at once 

 into those familiar problems of emotional maladjustment 

 with which the physician of the mind has largely been 

 preoccupied; he also faces many practical details of super- 

 visory training and executive organization, not to mention 

 the whole range of practices and techniques designed to 

 select employees for particular duties and to adjust them to 

 occupations in which their natural abilities and predilec- 

 tions find the greatest opportunity. 



The expert in scientific management also, faced with the 

 necessity of securing maximum output at minimum cost 

 in order that the enterprise may prosper and continue to 

 furnish steady employment, realizes that morale is essential, 

 that excessive labor turnover is inordinately expensive, 

 that industrial accidents due to worry and other pre- 

 occupations are an avoidable waste, and that the highest 



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