America's Changing Work Ethic

Archive Report

Changing Employee Values

Productivity Lag and the New Work Ethic

How many people work in your organization?” one executive asked another. “About half.” This old joke still is repeated in corporate boardrooms across the nation, but it probably produces fewer chuckles today than it did in the past. Growing concern about the United States' relatively sluggish productivity record of recent years has made worker performance a topic of intense scrutiny and debate. President Carter, in a televised address to the nation July 15, singled out declining productivity as one of the symptoms of the “crisis of the American spirit” which he said was “threatening to destroy the social and political fabric of America.”

Many economists and business executives regard productivity, broadly defined as output per man-hour, as ...

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