It is the first-level supervisor who must cope with such workers face to face and day to day. Many workers view their jobs as necessary evils to provide the resources for fulfilling their lives in leisure time, which they are pressing harder and harder to increase. No longer do they take authority at face value. Workers are no longer conformists who without question accept the rules and procedures that management lays down. In addition to the increasing pressure for administrative and clerical efficiency at the first level, two areas of supervisory competence that are continually problematic are human relations and technical knowledge. population between 20 and 29 were high school graduates, and 8 million Americans were enrolled in colleges and universities.) Challenge of the First Level Also, the fact that the educational level of the work force has continued to rise means that the supervisor does not often maintain an educational advantage over the worker. Supervisors must learn to deal with these new workers and yet guard against discriminatory practices. Also, the work force is aging as the post-World War II babies reach middle age, and challenges to mandatory retirement are widening the age spread.ДЄlong with age, the increase in working women and minorities has become a factor in the work force.

Handling the variety of attitudes and values in this multiple-generation worker base has become extremely difficult. More and more, the trend is for employees to be a heterogeneous group of individuals, many of whom are not especially dedicated to their jobs, their departments, or their companies.

1 This includes defining and assigning priorities, planning and organizing, and programming and coordinating the operating tasks of a department so that the objectives of both the department and the company as a whole are achieved.ДЇurthermore, the first-level supervisor must excel in interpersonal skills. Through such administrative competence, he or she must be able to link the unitвЂ™s accomplishments to the functioning of other organizational subunits.Д®ven at the first level, a supervisor must be able to think and act in terms of the total system of operation. Buried in an organizational web, this person must be adroit at administering a unit and at perceiving which, among all the daily tasks delegated downward, are the most important to accomplish. вЂњIf we donвЂ™t do something soon, weвЂ™re going to lose our best foremen-itвЂ™s no wonder that theyвЂ™re turned off, given the pressures they have to live with,вЂќ the plant manager at the same company said.Д«eing a first-level supervisor is one of the most difficult, demanding, and challenging jobs in any organization. We were there to do research on the function of first-level supervisors. вЂњOur supervisors can probably have more influence on our productivity, worker absenteeism, product quality, morale of our work force, labor relations, and cost reduction than any other group in the company,вЂќ the vice president of personnel at a manufacturing company recently told us. By allowing these lowest-level managers to use the levers of influence inherent in their position, higher-level managers will be improving the performance of the whole organization. Although first-level supervisors have the responsibility for implementing the goals of upper management, their organizational authority to carry out the necessary actions is frequently unclear and often insufficient. Today these supervisors are part of management, but chances are they were once among the employees they are now trying to supervise. First-level supervisors usually have mixed emotions about their situation and often lose their sense of identity as they try to perform this precarious balancing act. These needs are more often than not conflicting and even at times mutually exclusive. First-level supervisors must be able to harmonize the demands of management, the demands of the collective work force (often represented by unions), and the demands of workers with the requirements for doing the tasks at hand. In both positions, the ability to maintain oneвЂ™s balance when shifting forces pull in opposite directions is a measure of oneвЂ™s success. Performing well as a first-level supervisor is like walking the circus high wire.

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