The Workplace: Is Mr. Nice Guy Back?

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Good management is largely a matter of love. Or if you are uncomfortable | with that word, call it caring

-- James Autry, Love and Profit

What's that again? Love? Caring? But how can the Age of Aquarius be descending upon corporate America, flooding boardrooms with 1960s-era flower children, when retail chains are closing hundreds of outlets and major firms laying off thousands of employees?

At last look, tough-guy tactics were in vogue and such crash courses in killer management as Winning Through Intimidation and Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun were required reading in the executive suite. The practitioners were effective in at least one respect: their massive layoffs, often executed with the finesse of a Marine drill instructor, have left the atmosphere at many firms thick with hostility. "I feel like I'm walking along a geological fault line within U.S. companies," says Robert Rosen, author of a recent book, The Healthy Company. "There is more frustration and tension between employers and their employees than I've ever seen. Mutual cynicism and mistrust seem to be at an all-time high."

Into this breach comes a new breed of management experts and executives. In a spate of books with such titles as Love and Profit and A Great Place to Work, these experts are pulling in the horns and preaching a gospel of full worker participation in running companies. Such thinking has already won converts at the likes of Ford, Goodyear and General Electric. The books stress cooperation over conflict. "To compete in the marketplace, workers and management must collaborate," declares Charles Garfield, who describes his view in Second to None. "It is in these collaborations that human ingenuity and creativity are best realized."

This apparent New Age emphasis on teamwork and trust is really a homecoming for theories that U.S. companies cold-shouldered -- and Japanese managers embraced -- when American social scientists first proposed them in the 1950s and '60s as a key to creating high-quality products. After all, executives reasoned then, U.S. firms already dominated the world using top-down management. "These ideas are coming back now because of the quality movement here," says B. Joseph White, dean of the University of Michigan business school. "U.S. senior managers have decided they have got to catch up." That has helped make "empowerment" a buzz word for the '90s.

As a result, some companies are experimenting with employee groups ranging from the now familiar quality circles that discuss specific problems to self- managing teams that design and build entire products. "The typical company has put its foot in the water," says Edward Lawler, a management professor at the University of Southern California business school, who estimates that more than 80% of FORTUNE's top 1,000 firms have at least token employee participation. He adds, however, that few firms have installed such programs on a systematic, company-wide basis.