ABSTRACT
For human service organizations, the issue of poor quality of working life (QWL) raises an ethical dilemma: To what degree do human services attempt to produce quality outcomes for clients at the expense of their own workers? As Taber (1986) points out, quality benefits for clients result directly from the human interaction between clients and workers. More than public support, funding, policies, or facilities, clients and workers are the critical resources for human service organizations. From this perspective, the issue of inadequate QWL becomes a major concern for administrators, as its costs — to individuals, to organizational effectiveness, to society—are significant.
