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WHARTON School deserves full marks for bringing out a book titled The Enthusiastic Employee: How Companies Profit by Giving Workers What They Want and jointly authored by Drs David Sirota, Louis A. Mischkind and Michael Irwin Meltzer.

Its insights are distilled from the findings of surveys covering 2.5 million employees conducted since 1994. For, the relentless thrust of the book is towards bringing out the best in employees, raising their morale and intensifying their commitment to the goals of the organisations to the maximum level possible. Once the secret for achieving this is grasped and put to use, the organisations scale unimagined peaks of performance.

One learns, for instance, that out of 28 companies with 920,000 employees, 14 regarded as having high morale saw their share price going up by 16 per cent in 2004, as against the industry average of only six per cent, whereas the share price of companies where the employee morale was low rose by only three per cent, as against an overall industry average of 16 per cent. The fact that industry comparisons drew on data from an incredible base of 9240 companies vests the conclusions with a high degree of reliability and credibility.

Principles relating to motivation by both tangible (compensation packages) and intangible (career incentives) means, inculcation of self-pride and sense of participation, fairness and equity in treatment and prompt and generous recognition of excellence are as old as the hills and there is nothing revolutionary in them.

Where the book scores is in substantiating them with hard documentation and concrete examples. And bringing into play passion and the conviction, as evidenced by the long interview with Dr David Sirota reproduced in the Web site knowledge.wharton@upenn.edu.

The contents are essential reading for students and practitioners of human resource management, and supervisors and persons in leadership positions in all types of organisations, including those coming within the category of civil society.

While they need to be taken to heart by denizens of government bureaucracies in general, they have to be burnt into the psyche of the Indian genre, in particular, in view of its colonial hangovers, feudal rigidities and authoritarian work culture.

B. S. Raghavan

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