Changing Supervisors' Attitudes by Organization Development Training at the Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu, California
Abstract
The Naval Missile Center is beginning to live with its first negotiated agreement with a union of its employees. Management considers it advantageous to establish a cooperative labor-management relationship in order to profit by this new situation. It was hypothesized that conventional classroom training would not be as effective as organization development type training in changing attitudes of the supervisors to one of understanding and acceptance of the role of the union in this Federal activity. The report provides background on labor-management relations at the Naval Missile Center, Point Mugu, California; a review of pertinent literature on the humanistic aspects of the union-management relationship and attitude/behavior change; the conventional and organization development training techniques and test apparatus used; the statistical analysis of data; and the results, conclusions, and recommendations on labor relations training. The major findings were that supervisors and managers (1) were unaware of the union's presence at the beginning of this study, (2) were paternalistic, (3) changed their attitudes toward that of a positive acceptance of the role of the unions, largely due to organization development techniques; and (4) some supervisors/managers are still basically opposed to the concept of unions in government. Almost all of them now believe unions will continue to become more powerful and expand the areas in which they can collective-bargain, but oppose the right to strike.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 25, 1972
- Accession Number
- AD0743088
Entities
People
- Twain C. Lockhart