Employee Suggestions: Alternative Course of Action for Libraries

SoME LIBRARIANs, ESPECIALLY TIIOSE OF JUNIOR RANKS in large institutions, express feelings of frustration because they believe that their suggestions are not given a fair hearing by their supervisors. This paper examines the alternative courses of action which are available to a library willing to deal with this problem. How to deal with employee suggestions is a popular topic in the personnel management literature. The traditional approach has been to develop a suggestion system. Over sixty of these systems, as well as a number of general articles, were examined for this study, and not one has indicated that a suggestion system has been-or should be-instituted solely to alleviate a morale problem. Although the objectives mentioned most frequently were improvement in production methods and employee relations, elevation of employee morale was consistently presented as a secondary goal.1 An unfortunate problem with these studies is that, despite their quantity, most distinctly lack quality. In fact, only four could be considered scholarly.