The History Corner: The “My Job” Contest at General Motors
Scott Highhouse
Bowling Green State University
In 1947, General Motors (GM) invited employees to submit letters explaining “My Job and Why I Like It,” in an attempt to assess employee attitudes and raise morale, under the guise of a contest. The journal Personnel Psychology devoted an entire issue to a monograph describing the project (Evans & Laseau, 1950), and it was widely covered in industrial psychology textbooks and reviews of the field in the late 1940s and early 1950s (e.g., Bellows, 1951; Ryan & Smith, 1954). Despite the early attention given to this attempt at a new method of attitude assessment, it has not survived in the historical record of
I-O psychology. This article provides a brief overview of this curious contest.
In 1945, GM President Charles E. Wilson established the new Employee Relations Department. One impetus for this was a desire to separate employee relations from labor relations—ensuring that the UAW was not the exclusive voice of the workers (Raucher, 1987). Another force was Peter Drucker’s book Concept of the Corporation (1946 [1983]), which described his own experiences within GM. Drucker concluded in the book that, although GM was to be admired for its management innovations, its postwar employee relations should be based on a belief in the desire of workers to be proud of their jobs and what they produce.
Wilson determined that a major research project was needed to determine what aspects of work were truly important to GM workers. Although Wilson initially considered a large-scale employee survey, he believed that such a survey would have a low response rate and would constrain the determinants of employee morale to the dimensions measured by the survey. Wilson and his staff (notably, Harry Coen, vice president in charge of employee relations) devised a contest that would accentuate the positive and draw employee attention to the good things about their jobs (Evans & Laseau, 1950). The “My Job and Why I Like It” contest offered 5,145 prizes valued at more than $150,000 (roughly $1.4 million in today’s dollars), including 40 new GM cars. Among the judges was Peter Drucker, himself, and George Taylor who had been chair of the War Labor Board.
Of the eligible employees, 59% participated, but not all of them did so with good will. GM worker Paul Romano wrote about the My Job Contest in reporting his observations as a line worker:
The workers joke and laugh about the contest. Their remarks vary from: “The biggest liar will win,” to “The winners are already picked out.” Others say: “I like my job because I can feed my family,” “I like my job because I want to win a new Cadillac,” “I like my job because I want to keep my job,” etc.… The company is pressuring the workers to enter the contest. The foreman and plant superintendents have been going around trying to coerce workers into entering. One long employed worker was in the office about it. He noticed that the boss had a mark next to his name. He became furious and had an argument with him. He said that he would write a letter only if he himself decided. So far he had decided not to and no one was going to compel him (Romano & Stone, 1947, chapter 5, #3).
The photo below shows GM employees holding a banner encouraging participation in the contest.
First prize in the contest went to Thomas Anslow, 42, who operated a drop-forge hammer in Buick’s Flint, Michigan plant—he won a Cadillac. The contest and its results were widely covered by the media, including articles in Time magazine, New York Times, and BusinessWeek. GM President Wilson, who later went to Washington to run the Pentagon, considered the My Job Contest his “crowning achievement” at GM (Drucker, 1979).
From an applied perspective, the contest appeared to have minimal impact. GM prepared special manuals to code the content of the essays and asked local managers to prepare action plans to correct problems (Jacoby, 1988). The data collected through the contest also resulted in the production of informational pamphlets and placement of “information racks” within the plants. Remarkably, Drucker (1946 [1983]) suggested that the My Job Contest results were ignored by GM but were taken seriously by the Japanese. According to Drucker, “And while GM paid no attention to the findings of the ‘My Job and Why I Like It’ contest, Toyota, in the early 1950s somehow managed to get a copy of the unpublished findings and modeled its own employee relations on them” (p. 245).
From a research perspective, the contest entries were touted as a “gold mine” of data for researchers (Evans & Laseau, 1950). Evans and Laseau mentioned that studies were underway with prominent I-O psychology figures such as Joseph Tiffin and Charles Lawshe of Purdue University. Although I was only able to locate two published empirical articles that used the contest responses as data (MacKinney & Jenkins, 1954; Thompson & Davis, 1956), Frederick Hertzberg’s ideas about the dimensionality of job security were inspired by analyses of the My Job Contest responses (Herzberg, Mausner, Peterson, & Capwell, 1957).
In contrast to the “direct” methods of attitude assessment that are common to I-O, the My Job Contest was viewed as an indirect or projective method of attitude assessment (Korman, 1971). Differences in conditions at the different plants were to be inferred from the topics omitted in the essays (Ryan & Smith, 1954). Not surprisingly, there were many critics of this method (Bellows, 1951; Holly, 1951). Aside from the dubious nature of inferring problems from their absence, critics noted that the contest format likely discouraged people from insinuating anything negative about their jobs. The call for participation in the contest included the following:
No job is perfect. But whatever the job may be, there must be many good things about it. This contest will help you focus your attention on the things you like about your job. Whether or not you win one of the contest prizes, it is hoped that you and all who enter will win a more important prize—the habit of not overlooking the bright side—the knack of appreciating and enjoying what you have. (Evans & Laseau, 1950; p. A-65)
GM employee Paul Romano commented, “The contest seems more to have stimulated workers to thinking about what they do not like about their jobs. Many are entering in spite of their hatred of the job” (Romano & Stone, 1947; chapter 5, #3).
What are we to make of this event in the history of job-attitude measurement? Bedeian (2004) noted that such “historiographical landmarks” convey the nature of who we are as a profession and how we got here. Borrowing from psychological luminary and historian E.G. Boring, Bedeian noted that the “gift of professional maturity” comes only to those who know its history. Perhaps there are some lessons learned from the My Job Contest (e.g., I-O psychologists do not like qualitative analyses; projective attitude measures do not fly). Perhaps learning lessons is not the point of pursuing interesting stories like this one. Perhaps the point is that there is intrinsic value in shedding light on how, over the years, we have tried to understand organizational problems such as employee morale.
References
Bedeian, A. G. (2004). The gift of professional maturity. Academy of Management Learning and Education, 3, 92–98.
Bellows, R. M. (1951). Industrial psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 2, 173–192.
Evans, C. E., & Laseau, L. N. (1950). My Job Contest—An experiment in new employee relations methods. Personnel Psychology (Monograph #1), 1–141.
Drucker, P. F. (1946 [1983]). Concept of the corporation (2nd edition). New York: New American Library.
Drucker, P. F. (1979). Adventures of a bystander. New York: Harper & Row.
Herzberg, F., Mausner, B., Peterson, R. D. and Capwell, D. F. (1957). Job attitudes: Review of research and opinions. Pittsburgh, PA: Psychological Service of Pittsburgh.
Holly, J. F. (1951). My Job Contest by Chester E. Evans; La Verne N. Laseau (book review). Southern Economic Journal, 18, 270–271.
Jacoby, S. M. (1988). Employee attitude surveys in historical perspective. Industrial Relations, 27, 74–93.
Korman, A. K. (1971). Industrial and organizational psychology. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
MacKinney, A. C., Jenkins, J. J. (1954). Readability of employee’s letters in relation to occupational level. Journal of Applied Psychology, 38, 26–30.
Raucher, A. (1987). Employee relations at General Motors: The “My Job Contest,” 1947. Labor History, 28, 221–232.
Romano, P., & Stone, R. (1947). The American worker. http://libcom.org/history/american-worker-paul-romano-ria-stone.
Ryan, T. A., & Smith, P. C. (1954). Principles of industrial psychology. New York: The Ronald Press Company.
Thompson, A. S., & Davis, J. A. (1956). What workers mean by security. Personnel Psychology, 9, 229–241.