Mumford's Needs

DEVELOPERS

British sociologist and computer scientist Enid Mumford (1924-2006.

BACKGROUND

Mumford’s Needs refers to an approach to job satisfaction that examined how a company’s organizational needs fit with employees’ needs in the workplace (Mumford, 1991). Mumford (1983a, 1983b, 1991) saw job satisfaction as a result of management and employees creating a form of contract on five broad areas of worker needs: knowledge, psychological, efficiency (or support/control), ethical, and task structure. If management and employees can agree on all of these, employees will be satisfied, she posited.

Mumford (1983a) defined job satisfaction as the “attainment of a good ‘fit’ between what employees are seeking from their work – their job needs, expectations, and aspirations – and what they are required to do in their work – their organizational job requirements, which mold their experience”[1] (p. 40). In other words, in her view, both the employee and the employer can be satisfied in a form of equilibrium if the needs provide a good fit.

She defined the five employee needs as follows: knowledge, need to fully use skills and learn new things; psychological, need for recognition, status, responsibility, and advancement; support/control/efficiency, need for support staff, a fair pay structure, and encouragement from supervisors; task, need to use a variety of skills, have autonomy, and get feedback; ethical/moral, need for fair treatment and communication about important decisions (Mumford, 1983a; Mumford 1983b; Mumford, 1991).

Mumford (1983b) further characterized these needs into three groups: needs associated with one’s personality, which were knowledge and psychological needs; needs associated with competency, control, and efficiency, which were support/control and task needs; and needs associated with employee values, which were ethical/moral needs.

She developed what she called the ETHICS – Effective Technical and Human-Implementation of Computer-based Systems – Model, which put into practice her ideas about a job satisfaction and employee needs (Mumford, 1983b). She used her understanding of worker needs to facilitate implementation of new computer systems in a way that employees and users would find motivating. Mumford (1983a) believed that job satisfaction and greater worker efficiency were interrelated goals because satisfied employees will perform better.

Her ETHICS model employed socio-technical principles that incorporated the idea that a company’s needs do not have to clash with employees’ needs, but can work in tandem to produce a good outcome for both employees and the company’s bottom line (Mumford, 1983b). Mumford (2003) developed these ideas as a way to manage company change because she believed “participative strategies for meeting human needs at work can achieve higher morale, more job satisfaction, greater efficiency and an improved quality of life” (p. viii). She saw her ideas as having relevance for blue-collar work initially, although she later focused on computer technology (Mumford, 2003), and, in the last years of her life, she suggested applying these ideas to cyber-crime and drug problems (Mumford, 1999).

Theorists who preceded her, such as Maslow (1987) and Herzberg (1966) influenced Mumford, although American sociologist Talcott Parsons (1951, 1977, & 1978) had a strong impact on her work. Mumford (1983b) explained that Parsons’ (1951) idea that change involved setting goals, adaption, integration of ideas, and reinforcing new patterns to produce stabilization informed her work. Parsons (1951) defined a social system as a “plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation … who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the ‘optimization of gratification’ “(p. 5). He also wrote that social systems operate through a complex series of interdependencies among people (Parsons, 1977). He used this concept in his theory of action, which posited that people act to gratify needs or avoid deprivations (Parsons, 1951). Parsons (1951) also compared needs to a spring, suggesting pressure will be exerted on the spring if a need is not met, and, eventually, the spring will break. This idea seems to inform Mumford’s (1983a, 1983b) concept that her five job satisfaction needs must be met to produce a form of equilibrium, which she called “fit” between the employees’ needs and company needs.

[1] Note all British spellings have been Americanized in quotes and paraphrase from Mumford for this document.

REFERENCES ~ Coding Spreadsheet - Web View

• Herzberg, F. (1966). Work and nature of man. New York, NY: Crowell, Thomas Y. Young.
• Maslow, A. (1987). Motivation and personality (3^rd.). New York, NY: Harper & Row.
• Mumford, E. (1983a). Designing participatively. Manchester, England: Manchester Business School.
• Mumford, E. (1983b). Designing human systems. Manchester, England: Manchester Business School.
• Mumford, E. (1991). Job satisfaction: A method of analysis. Personnel Review, 20(3), 11-20.
• Mumford, E. (1999). Dangerous decisions: Problem solving in tomorrow’s world. New York, NY: Kluwer Academic.
• Mumford, E. (2003). Redesigning human systems. Hershey, PA: IRM Press.
• Parsons, T. (1951). The social system. New York: NY: Collier Macmillan.
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• Yousef, D.A. (2002). Job satisfaction as a mediator of the relationship between job stressors and affective, continuance, and normative commitment: A path analysis approach.International Journal of Stress Management, 9(2), 99-112.