ABSTRACT
Since the Western Electric researches, 1 few studies of single groups of workers have been reported, and even fewer that combined the measurement of individual effectiveness with the systematic observation of social behavior and the interviewing of all the group members. I shall briefly describe here a study that did combine these features. It is a study of the ten girl “cash posters” in an accounting division of a certain company, and it formed part of a study of the division as a whole, which I carried on from December, 1949, through April, 1950. Since it deals with only one group and that group had only ten members, it can hardly hope to establish general hypotheses about small group behavior. Several such studies, made with comparable methods, might hope to do so, and they would provide the indispensable background to more macroscopic studies of worker behavior, made by questionnaires. But by itself the present one can only be called a case study of the relations between repetitive work, individual behavior, and social organization in a clerical group.
