Man as Industrial Palace: Famous 1926 Lithograph Brought to Life

In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a German gynecologist and anatomy textbook author, produced a lithograph called Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) that depicted the human body as a factory (see here), a chemical plant of sorts.

Kahn’s body came complete with mechanical lungs, a rock-sorting stomach, gears for a throat, and a switchboard for a brain, and it illustrated rather metaphorically the degree to which industrialization had taken over Western life, creating deep anxiety for some and curiosity for others.

More than eighty years later, Henning Lederer, a German artist, has brought Kahn’s mechanical body to life with some gifted animation. This dynamic version is currently on display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art as part of the “Health for Sale” exhibition.

To learn more about Lederer’s project, you will want to spend more time on IndustriePalast.com and particularly with this helpful PDF. Other animation by Lederer appears on Vimeo. Many thanks to Elliot for sending this along.

Contented, fullfilled employees is the key to success…for organizations

We spend a lot of our waking time at work, so it’s not surprising that work has an influence on our well-being: Numerous studies have linked general attitudes towards work to mood outside of work and health outcomes such as coronary heart disease. However, psychological scientist James K. Harter of Gallup, Inc. and his colleagues found that employee perceptions of work conditions may also have a big impact on the bottom line of employing organizations.

In this study, the researchers examined data from more than 2,000 business units (e.g., retail stores, factories, sales offices) of ten companies. The data consisted of employee satisfaction surveys, employee retention rates, customer loyalty, and financial performance of the organizations. Analyses of the data were conducted to identify relationships between employee job satisfaction and outcome measures of the organizations.

The results indicate that employee work perceptions predict important organizational outcomes — if employees have positive perceptions of their jobs, their organizations benefit via higher employee retention, increased customer loyalty, and improved financial outcomes. Interestingly, the analysis suggests that employee perceptions affect outcomes more than outcomes affect employee perceptions of their jobs.

“One implication is that changes in management practices that improve employee perceptions of specific work situation variables will increase business-unit outcomes, including financial outcomes,” the authors note. Additionally, Harter and colleagues offer that one way managers can help boost job satisfaction and help their organization may be to “clarify expectations for employees by helping employees see the ultimate outcomes the organization is working to achieve and how they play a role in achieving those outcomes.”

For further reading on workplace discontent, please read:

LeBlanc, M. M. & Barling, J. (2004). Workplace aggression. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 13(1), 9-12. doi:10.1111/j.0963-7214.2004.01301003.x

Riley, H. R. & Gelfand, M. (2010). Status and the evaluation of workplace deviance. Psychological Science, 13(1), 49-54. doi: 10.1177/0956797609356509

Spector, P. E. (2002). Employee control and occupational stress. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11(4), 133-136. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.00185