Who is the ‘one best man?’: Taylorism and personality tests (1924-1955)

ABSTRACT

Between 1924 and 1955 factory managers introduced personality tests as a new tool to discriminate amongst large pools of potential employees. The new worker protections granted by New Deal legislation alarmed factory managers who developed personality tests to identify the ‘best workers,’ or least politically active ones, amongst a rising group of union sympathizers. Personality tests became important tools in the emergence of Human Resource Management, whose foundational thinkers compared themselves against the dominant model of factory management: Taylorism. They argued that Taylorism focused exclusive attention on the refinement of the physical movements of workers in order to maximize productivity and ignored the workers’ emotional needs. Traditional scholarship has drawn sharp distinctions between Human Resource Management and Taylorism by praising the former’s interest in protecting worker emotions and morale. However, this article argues that by incorporating personality tests, Taylorist managers assessed worker psychology in order to control their workers more efficiently.

KEYWORDS:

• Personality test
• Taylorism
• human resource management
• management
• anti-union
• factory
• psychology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Though maladjustment was an intentionally vague and flexible term for most businesses, some researchers, such as Natalie Davidson wrote in 1947, ‘An individual who has a maladjusted personality is one in whom there exists a form of temperamental, emotional, or personality imbalance, which manifests itself in a deviation in behavior and attitude from the accepted norms of the group to which the individual belongs … a maladjusted personality … may be of a basic or constitutional nature, or else may be attributed to experiences in the individual’s environment’

2. The Detroit exam exemplifies both ‘aptitude’ and ‘vocational discernment’ type of testing. The main difference between the two is where they are used. An aptitude test is more likely to be a screening mechanism used by corporations, while a vocational discernment test is more likely to be used in an educational setting to help minors to determine what the type of work they are ‘called’ to do. In this way, the Detroit exam is both an aptitude and vocational discernment test, depending on where it is being used and for what purpose.

3. Standard Oil was a client of the successful Taylorist management consulting firm, Bedaux, in the 1930s and 1940s. in (Nelson, 1995).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Grant Mongin

Grant Mongin is graduate student in the Department of History, at California State University, Long Beach. His subject interests focus on histories of labor, capitalism, and psychology in the late-nineteenth and twentieth-century United States. He produced this article as part of his forthcoming master’s thesis.