GROUP PSYCHOTHERAPY AND ROLE PLAYING IN LABOR RELATIONS: A CASE STUDY

Abstract

Generated by a kind of "social conscience" industrial management has accorded increasing attention to that area euphemistically referred to as Human Relations; and, it has even seen ft to venture into fields of endeavor which it formerly considered to be foreign to its interests and needs. From its technological and mechanical orientation industrial management's emphasis has been slowly channeled into a bio-social awareness of the importance of the personal equation; that the individual and his work group are permanent and inexorable sources of both pain and pleasure in industrial life. A most interesting aspect, incidentally, about this awakening of management to the need for "humanizing" its organization along predetermined lines (paralleling technologic improvements of its operations), which can be classified as psychengineering, is the abject failure of the social organization to comprehend the nature and complexity of the problems of management. In effect, the formal organization claims the informal
organization suffers from a form of "intellectual myopia," i.e., an inability to perceive the long range issues because of a limited frame of reference. On the other hand, the informal organization charges the formal organization engages in sundry acts of mental masturbation.