Cumulative investigations in Europe, Scandinavia, Australia, North America and India have enabled social scientists to identify a number of important determinants of the psychological requirements of productive activity, located both in the dynamics of person-task relations and in the social climate of the work situation. There is a core of six such requirements.

It is clear that particularly the first three of these requirements which refer to the content of the job need to be optimal for any given individual and flexible to meet variations in individual need; e.g., from day to day, or morning to afternoon.

• Adequate elbow room. The sense that they are their own bosses and that except in exceptional circumstances they do not have some boss breathing down their necks. Not too much elbow room that they just don’t know what to do next.

• Chances of learning on the job and going on learning. We accept that such learning is possible only when people are able to (a) set goals that are reasonable challenges for them and (b) get a feedback of results in time for them to correct their behavior.

• An optimal level of variety; i.e., they can vary the work so as to avoid boredom and fatigue and so as to gain the best advantages from settling into a satisfying rhythm of work.

• Conditions where they can and do get help and respect from their work mates. Avoiding conditions where it is in no one’s interest to lift a finger to help another: where people are pitted against each other so that ‘one person’s gain is another’s loss’: where the group interest denies the individual’s capabilities or inabilities (as in the bull gang system that used to characterize Australian dock work and New Zealand’s meat freezing works).

• A sense of one’s own work meaningfully contributing to social welfare. That is, not something that could as well be done by a trained monkey or an industrial robot machine. Or something that the society could probably be better served by not having it done or at least not having it done so shoddily. Meaningfulness includes both the worth and quality of a product, and having a perception of the whole product. Many jobs which are meaningful in the first sense have been downgraded because individuals see only such a small part of the final product that its meaning is denied them.

• A desirable future. Put simply, not a dead-end job; but hopefully one with a career path which will continue to allow personal growth and skills increase.

Experience has shown that these psychological requirements cannot be better met by simply fiddling with individual job specifications; e.g., job enlargement, rest pauses, supervisory contacts (see ‘The Light on the Hill’ herein). If the nature of the work allows room for improvement this will be best achieved by locating responsibility, for control over effort and quality of personal work and for interpersonal co-ordination, with the people who are actually doing the job.