NYT, July 3.

Harry Levinson, a psychologist who helped change corporate America’s thinking about the workplace by demonstrating a link between job conditions and emotional health — a progressive notion when he began developing his ideas in the 1950s — died on Tuesday in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 90.

As a management consultant and an educator at Harvard, M.I.T. and other universities, and through books, seminars and his own research institute, Dr. Levinson showed how psychoanalytical theories and methods could be used to motivate employees. He was among the first psychologists to postulate a connection between thwarted career aspirations and depression.

Many of his management theories are now practically truisms. But to the gray-flannel corporate culture of the postwar years, they were novel, compelling many managers to think beyond the traditional reward system of promotions and paychecks to motivate employees.

Dr. Levinson argued that a psychological contract existed between employees and employers, laying out the expectations each had of the other. Employees who feel that their employers have violated that contract will feel depressed, he said, and may well become underachievers.

He envisioned an even more dire situation in which employees despair of ever reaching their full potential — in psychological parlance, when they face a wide gap between their self-image and their ego ideal. It did not matter if such discontented employees were reacting to workplace unfairness or to their own inherent insecurities, he said; in either case, they were likely to feel helpless and depressed, and thus be underproductive or even disruptive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/28/bu...ies-at-90.html