THE  MEASURE  OF  COMPARATIVE  PRODUCTIVENESS  309
of  work.  As  soon  as  they  are  paid  a  bonus  or  piece-work
rate,  individual  differences  begin  to  increase  and  it  becomes ­
  possible  to  compare  employees  on  the  basis  of
production.  There  are  numerous  conditions  which  arise
to  defeat  the  purposes  of  the  piece-work  rate  and  to  hinder
the  free  development  of  the  individual.  These  conditions
are  known  to  most  managers  and  we  may  therefore  include
them  by  suggestion  in  the  following  law:
Two  or  more  employees  can  be  compared  on  the  basis  of
productiveness  only  when  they  are  allowed  to  produce
under  conditions  which  will  encourage  them  to  develop  to
their  fullest  capacity.
It  may  be  objected  that  the  three  conditions  outlined
here  as  essential  to  a  comparison  of  individuals  are  too
idealistic,  too  theoretical,  too  far  in  the  future  for  immediate ­
  application.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  they  have  already
been  realized.  They  are  not  theories  but  actualities.  The
great  industrial  development  of  the  age  has  been  the
division  and  standardization  of  productive  processes.  All
operations  are  being  broken  down  into  their  elements,  and
instead  of  one  man  performing  a  hundred  different  operations ­
  on  a  single  product,  as  in  time  past,  we  now  have  one
hundred  men  performing  exactly  the  same  operation  on  a
single  part  of  the  product.  In  this  phenomenon,  we  have
the  fulfillment  of  the  conditions  indicated  in  the  first  two
laws.  The  third  condition  is  fulfilled  in  the  generally
accepted  piece-work  principle.  These  three  conditions,
namely,  the  standardization  of  operations,  tools,  and
rates—already  carried  out  to  an  enormous  extent—are
likely  to  be  realized  still  more  extensively.  There  is  no
prophesying  what  their  scope  will  be  in  the  coming  industrial ­
  period.