ABSTRACT
THUS far the practical operation of the interviewing program has been described: how the interviewing program provided concrete material about particular conditions in the company which could be investigated and sometimes corrected; how it supplied case material for the training of supervisors; and how it functioned, in a general way, for the employees, the supervisors, and the interviewers themselves. As has been shown, the successful practical operation of the plan depended, in part, on whether or not the complaints could be used by management at their face value as a basis for the improvement of working conditions, supervision, and employee relations policy. As the interviewing program continued, the utility of employee comments, in the direct fashion originally conceived, became more and more questionable. It was not that the employees were willfully telling falsehoods; the skilled interviewer was able to detect such responses fairly easily. But the use by management of the complaints made by employees depended on three conditions: (1) the extent to which the complaints were accurately stated; (2) the extent to which the complaints had an objective reference, and so could be verified independently of the individual who made the complaint; and therefore (3) the extent to which the conditions complained about could be stated in terms of standards which are generally accepted.
