EDO 810 Module 3 Human Relations and Behavioral Perspectives Example

Nobody Ever Tells Us How the Call Ended: Human Relations, Job Design and Psychological Safety on a 911 Floor

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Doctor of Education Program, Aspen University

EDO 810: Organizational Theory

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Nobody Ever Tells Us How the Call Ended: Human Relations, Job Design and Psychological Safety on a 911 Floor

The Tri-County Emergency Communications Authority hires about thirty telecommunicators a year, and 46% of each group has left within two years. Each departure costs about $38,000 in recruiting, a sixteen-week training program and overtime to cover the empty seat. Exit interviews repeat three complaints: mandatory overtime, quality reviews that feel like punishment and, most often, never learning how a call ended. Module 2 traced part of the problem to coercive rules. This paper asks what human relations and behavioral perspectives add. The authority, its people and its numbers are invented.

The Human Relations Turn, Read Critically

Human relations theory is usually traced to the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric in the 1920s and 1930s, which were read as showing that workers' output depended more on attention, social relations and morale than on physical conditions or pay. That reading shaped decades of management teaching. Franke and Kaul (1978) reanalyzed the data from the best-known Hawthorne experiment, the relay assembly test room, using statistical methods unavailable to the original researchers. They found that most of the variation in output was explained by managerial discipline, including the replacement of two uncooperative workers, by the economic pressure of the Depression and by the introduction of rest periods. Social and relational factors explained relatively little.

The reanalysis does not refute the human relations tradition, but it removes its founding myth. Claims about the importance of relationships, recognition and meaning at work must rest on later, stronger evidence, of which there is a good deal. This paper uses two lines of it.

The Job Itself

Hackman and Oldham (1976) proposed and tested a model of how the design of a job shapes motivation. The model lists five job features: how many different skills the work draws on, whether the worker completes a whole and visible piece of work, how much the work affects other people, how much say the worker has over methods and timing, and whether the work itself shows how well it went. These were expected to create three inner states: a sense that the work means something, a sense of personal responsibility for how it turns out and actual knowledge of the results. Those states in turn were linked to internal motivation, satisfaction and performance, with stronger effects for employees who valued personal growth. Testing the model with several hundred employees in dozens of jobs across several organizations, they found substantial support for most of its predictions.

A Profile of Call-Taking

The profile explains the exit interviews. In Hackman and Oldham's terms, telecommunicators experience the meaningfulness of their work intensely but lack knowledge of results and a sense of responsibility for outcomes. They give instructions for chest compressions, hear the line go quiet when responders arrive and never learn what happened. A job with very high significance and almost no feedback is a recipe for anxiety rather than motivation.

The Climate of the Team

Edmondson (1999) surveyed and observed 51 teams at an office furniture manufacturer and named a team-level condition she called psychological safety: members' common confidence that speaking up, admitting a slip or asking a naive question will not cost them standing in the group. Where that confidence ran higher, teams practiced more of the habits by which groups get better, raising questions, asking outsiders for reactions, talking openly about mistakes and trying new approaches, and those habits went along with stronger results. Psychological safety was shaped by leaders' behavior and by the team's context, not simply by individual personalities.

The authority's quality review undermines this climate. Each month a reviewer scores a sample of calls, counts deviations from protocol as errors and posts scores by name. Telecommunicators describe learning to stick to the script even when it does not fit, and not asking supervisors for help on a difficult call for fear of a low score. After critical incidents, such as a child's death or a caller's suicide, there is no structured debrief; telecommunicators go back to the next call. A floor where admitting uncertainty feels dangerous cannot learn from its hardest calls. One veteran supervisor described the pattern plainly in an exit interview: new hires stop asking for help in their third month, which is also the month the quality scores start to count, and the ones who keep asking are usually the ones who stay. That observation fits the climate Edmondson described and suggests where a leader should start.

Three Changes

Each of the three proposals below targets one of the profile's low scores. First, outcome follow-up: once a week, supervisors will obtain outcomes for a handful of serious calls from hospital and fire partners, with privacy protections, and share them with the telecommunicators who took them. The change gives the work a way to report its own results, the dimension the profile scored lowest. Second, bounded judgment: following Module 2, supervisors may approve justified deviations from protocol with a short note, which raises autonomy and turns quality review from scoring into teaching. Third, peer-led debriefs: after every critical incident, a trained peer will lead a confidential conversation within forty-eight hours, and quality scores will not be posted by name. These steps build the psychological safety Edmondson linked to learning.

Limits of the Perspective

Human relations and behavioral perspectives explain much of the turnover, but not all. Mandatory overtime, the most frequent complaint, is a staffing and rules problem that job redesign cannot fix, and pay below that of nearby agencies drives some departures. The perspective also treats the authority as a single workplace, while the next modules will show that its environment and its three founding agencies shape the job in ways no supervisor controls.

Conclusion

Franke and Kaul caution against resting human relations theory on the Hawthorne story, but later evidence supports its central claims. Hackman and Oldham's model shows that call-taking combines extreme significance with almost no feedback or autonomy, and Edmondson shows why a punitive review climate prevents learning. Outcome follow-ups, bounded judgment and peer debriefs address those weaknesses directly and could reduce a turnover rate that costs the authority more than half a million dollars a year.

References

Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999

Franke, R. H., & Kaul, J. D. (1978). The Hawthorne experiments: First statistical interpretation. American Sociological Review, 43(5), 623-643. https://doi.org/10.2307/2094540

Hackman, J. R., & Oldham, G. R. (1976). Motivation through the design of work: Test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance, 16(2), 250-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/0030-5073(76)90016-7