ABSTRACT
Despite their relatively brief professional history, air traffic controllers have acquired a reputation in some countries as quite a difficult workforce to manage. Whether the original reasons for this were controllers’ intransigence, managerial ineptitude, or mutual failures to communicate is difficult to determine retrospectively, and profitless except to prevent their recurrence. A series of formal investigations in the United States almost a quarter of a century ago put most blame on poor communications between management and workforce, and revealed simmering discontent more than a decade before the strike there by air traffic controllers. But relationships have been unsatisfactory in several other countries also. All pat explanations are probably specious. Perhaps the very attributes for which controllers are selected tend to produce independent-minded people who are quick to query any management decisions that affect their work. Perhaps management has not succeeded in explaining why certain changes are essential to maintain an efficient service, and the cost constraints on those changes. Perhaps controllers failed to convey adequately to managers their real needs in the workspace. Perhaps management tried to communicate with controllers, but controllers were unwilling to listen. A job satisfaction survey of the managers of controllers has suggested that communications could still be improved (Myers, 1990).
