Human Capability: A Study of Individual Potential and Its Objective Evaluation - Hardcover

Jaques, Elliott; Cason, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0962107077 ISBN 13: 9780962107078

Publisher: Cason Hall & Co Pub, 1994

Synopsis

Reporting research that provides an invaluable tool for utilizing individual capability, it makes it possible for talent pool development programs to effectively meet the organization's future human resource requirements.

About this title

About the Author

Elliott Jaques is Visiting Research Professor in Management Science at George Washington University. He has been engaged in practical field work over the past 50 years in the development and real life testing of a comprehensive theory-based system of organizational structure and managerial processes, including fundamental developments in our understanding of the meaning of work. This system calls for sweeping changes in approach to organizational development work and in the evaluation and development of individuals engaged in work.

This development work has been carried out in projects in industry and commerce, in government, in social, educational and health services, in the Church of England and the U.S. Army. In this latter connection Elliott Jaques was awarded the Joint Staff Certificate of Appreciation by General Colin Powell on behalf of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the U.S. Armed Forces for "outstanding contributions in the field of military leadership theory and instruction to all of the service departments of the United States."

Throughout his career, Jaques has continuously combined work with organizations and with individuals against the background of a B.A. Honors Science degree from the University of Toronto, an M.D. from Johns Hopkins Medical School, a Ph.D. in Social Relations from Harvard, and qualification as a psychoanalyst at the British Psychoanalytical Society. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatry. Author of 18 books, including Requisite Organization, 1996, Human Capability, 1994 (with K. Cason), and Executive Leadership, 1991 (with S. Clement).

Jaques served as a Major in the Canadian Army during WWII as liaison to the British Army War Officer Selection Board (WOSB). He remained in England after the war. He was a founding member of the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations but quickly found that the group dynamics approach did not accurately reflect the reality of managerial accountabilities.1 In 1964, he was invited, as Head of School, to develop the School of Social Sciences at Brunel University in London, and its Research Institute of Organizational Studies.

During his career, Jaques has been responsible for a series of major discoveries in the social sciences, contributing in a significant way to our understanding of human nature and social institutions. The most well known is his formulation of the mid-life crisis, but others with very significant implications include: -

a method for objectively measuring the complexity of work roles, that in turn made possible the discovery of the unexpected existence of universal norms of fair pay for work, which upturns our current assumptions about human greed in relation to pay; -

an objective understanding of the nature of human potential capability, and of its maturation throughout life from infancy through old age, that will change the basis of developmental psychology, and our approach to education; -

the detailed specifications of a range of different organizational systems for industry and commerce, public service, churches, schools and universities, hospitals, and the military, that are requisite in the sense that they provide both for efficient work and for socially healthy settings for human relationships and individual growth.

These developments and many others will make a substantial contribution to the betterment of society and its values. 1 See "On Leaving the Tavistock Institute". Human Relations, Vol. #51, No. 3, 1998, pp. 251-257.

Kathryn Cason's long standing interest in the nature of work and individual capability was significantly enriched upon finding Jaques' A General Theory of Bureaucracy. Since 1979 she has been engaged in collaboration with Jaques on research projects that led to the clarification and validation of the relationship of the four mental processes to the hierarchy of work strata in employment organizations. Cason and Jaques continue to test, against this research, their formulations for the affect of future potential upon current actual capability; the role of personal values and interest in actual capability for specific work roles, and the nature of information complexity in childhood, leading up to the first level of capability for employment.

Ms. Cason has worked as advisor to senior management for more than 20 years. Her organizational project work has spanned a broad spectrum of industries from transportation, engineering and finance, to retail and the energy industry, with a focus for the past 13 years on nuclear generation and energy services. In these projects she has tested Elliott Jaques' research findings for general applicability and effectiveness, developed implementation tools for practitioners, and trained other professionals.

Ms. Cason's management career was spent in financial services, marketing, management education and human resources. She was formerly Executive Director of the Human Resource Planning Society, New York, N.Y.; Division Manager, American Management Association, New York. She attended the University of Oklahoma and the University of Missouri, majoring in economics and sociology. Ms. Cason is President of Stratified Systems Inc., New York and Maryland.

From the Inside Flap

In 1956, Elliott Jaques first uncovered evidence that individuals mature in capability within predictable patterns and that this maturation continues throughout life. These discoveries led him to the idea that the levels of abstraction in human capability correspond to the natural hierarchy of work strata in employment organizations. This theory has been continually tested since that time, and is now confirmed with the study reported in Human Capability, A Study of Individual Potential and its Application (with K. Cason), his seventeenth book.

Cason and Jaques continue to test, against this research, their formulations for the affect of future potential upon current actual capability; the role of personal values and interest in actual capability for specific work roles, and the nature of information complexity in childhood, leading up to the first level of capability for employment. Other recent titles by Jaques that address these issues are Requisite Organization and Executive Leadership.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Human Capability and Work One of the most important of human capabilities is the capability to work. Whether or not it is more or less important than the capability to procreate is a moot point which need not bother us here. Work and procreation are both so absolutely essential for the survival and adaptation of the human species that it would be a fruitless exercise to try to rank-order them. For it is through our work that we produce the necessities of life, maintain our political and governmental systems and services, run our homes and care for our families, teach our children, care for the ill, create works of art, and even carry out our recreational activities.

Yet, despite its critical importance, very little is known about work: it does not have a straightforward and generally accepted definition and meaning (even among work-study specialists and among so-called experts in the organization and management of work systems). And our lack of knowledge about work is compounded by our lack of knowledge about the meaning of the capability to be able to do it.

What we do know, in very general terms, is that some people are able to do something that might be called "higher levels of work" than others, variously referred to as more "highly responsible" work, or "bigger jobs," or more "complex" work, or more "difficult" work: not just more work in quantity, but somehow greater or lesser in scope or degree. But this peculiar quality of greater and lesser (or higher and lower) capability in work has never been measured.

Approximations to such measurement have been attempted in various types of intelligence testing. But there is no more adequate definition of intelligence than there is of work, and intelligence tests have been validated mainly in relation to academic learning of certain limited types of knowledge to be regurgitated in examinations at primary and secondary schools-a far cry from the measurement of adult-or even child-capability to carry higher and lower levels of work.

The object of the study we are reporting in this book was to develop a method for the effective evaluation of the potential capability of individuals-both children and adults-to carry given levels of work. We believe that we have succeeded in establishing an objective measure that ordinary, competent adults can be taught to understand and to use with high reliability. It has been validated against the judged potential capability in work of a group of adults of all ages and of a wide range of capability levels, at the above .90 correlation that you would expect of any objective measures in the natural sciences. It is this study and its results that we shall describe.

It should be appreciated from the start that one major consequence of our study is that it will eliminate intelligence tests and will render unnecessary clinical assessments of mental capability. Since intelligence tests have never been satisfactorily validated for predicting capability in work, and since clinical judgments depend upon the clinical experience and ability of the person making the judgment, their elimination is no great loss. But there is another consequence that follows; namely, that if and when the concepts and procedures to be described become widely understood in society, then everyone will know everyone's level of potential capability as an ordinary everyday matter: parents of each other and of their children; teachers of pupils; managers of subordinates, and vice versa; the public of their politicians; and so on and on. It is our firm belief that society would be no worse off. These judgments are currently made velle nelle: it is far better that they should be made accurately. Work, Capability, and Democratic Free Enterprise

The development of an objective measure of the level of work capability in individuals has become an urgent and critical task in the modern world for the following reason. One of the main features of economically developed nations is that they are full-scale employment societies; that is to say, the vast majority of their people who work for a living do so by getting employment for a wage or salary in a managerial hierarchical organization. Except for Great Britain, which developed into a full-scale employment society in the first half of the twentieth century, the other so-called fully developed nations reached full-scale employment society status largely in the second half of the twentieth century. Thus, for example, the United States reached the 93% mark only a few years ago; that is to say, reached the point where 93% of the working population-125 million people in all-were employed in positions in managerial hierarchical organizations, and only 7% were self-employed.

This fact of the coming into existence of the employment society makes urgently necessary an objective method of measuring each person's potential level of capability in work. For the opportunity to get work within employment systems (in contrast to being self-employed), at a level consistent with one's potential capability, rests upon the judgments of that potential by someone else-a manager, or a human resources "expert," or an outside psychological "expert"-and the fact is that there exists no objectively based expertise.

For fully developed democratic free enterprise societies to continue to thrive, they must provide reasonable opportunities for all of their citizens to gain employment at levels that allow them to use their potential capability to the fullest, so that society gains from the full contribution of its peoples' talent and creativity, and each of us can get the enormous satisfaction that comes with the full exercise of our potential in our work. There are equally great consequences for education of having a greater understanding of the true potential capability of our children.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cason Hall & Co Pub
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0962107077
• ISBN 13: 9780962107078
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 165