Scientific job analysis broke work into gradable components

Evidence

Moses’ assistants sat for days watching city workers perform their jobs so that they could break each job down into gradable components. They observed employees of private businesses. They interviewed department heads and civil service commissioners in other cities. Soon memos addressed to “Dr. Moses” were flooding onto his desk. By the spring of 1915, he was able to begin writing the Detailed Report on the Rating of the Efficiency of Civil Service Employees, Excepting Members of the Uniformed Forces in the Police and Fire Services and in the Lower Ranks of the Street Cleaning Service. Day after day, he sat in the Bureau, his fine-pointed pen racing over the pages of yellow legal note pads. Often, coming across a point he wanted to check himself, he would fling himself out of his chair and out of the Bureau offices, and stride, sometimes breaking in his haste into a few steps of a run and then self-consciously checking himself and settling back into a walk, over to City Hall or the Municipal Building, where he could see records and officials himself. Soon, to save time, he asked for and was given a desk of his own in the Civil Service Commission offices on the fourteenth floor of the Municipal Building, his first toehold in the halls of power. He wrote and rewrote sections of the report before sending them off to the typist. And when they returned, the fine-pointed pen slashed at the neat pages, crossing out words, putting in others, clarifying, refining, hardening. On July 8, 1915, after nineteen months of work, he typed on a Bureau letterhead: “Dear Commissioner James: I am transmitting herewith detailed report…” — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 317

Categorization

• XREF: Moses’s obsessive verification — physically running to check records himself — mirrors the personality traits Caro documents throughout his career. — connects to: Precise job evaluation requires decomposing roles into weighted component parts — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 309; Precise job evaluation requires component grading with weighted totals — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 308; Complex tasks get decomposed into chunks that mirror organizational structure — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1988

Broader Connections

• Precise job evaluation requires component grading with weighted totals #expands (0.95) — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 308
• Complex tasks get decomposed into chunks that mirror organizational structure #expands (0.85) — Roderick M. Kramer, Geoffrey J. Leonardelli, Robert W. Livingston, Social Cognition, Social Identity, and…, 1988