Elliott Jaques (January 18, 1917 – March 8, 2003) was a Canadian psychoanalyst, social scientist and management consultant known as the originator of concepts such as corporate culture, midlife crisis, fair pay, maturation curves, time span of discretion (level of work)[1] and requisite organization, as a total system of managerial organization.
In 1965 Jaques published an essay on working patterns of creative geniuses in which he coined the phrase midlife crisis.
The origins of Jaques's theories can be traced back to 1952, when Britain's Glacier Metal Company asked him to help to develop a worker participation plan.
Peter Drucker called this work "the most extensive study of actual worker behavior in large-scale industry".
[5] As a result of the research carried out for the US Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences and American and Australian companies on the study of mental complexity, it was found that individuals process information at work in four ways: declarative, cumulative, serial and parallel.
This study demonstrated the interdependence of layers of the managerial hierarchy and each separate step in mental processing complexity.
From this work it was concluded that organizational life of intermittent steps in the nature of human capability reflects the essence of managerial hierarchical structure (Jaques, 1994).
Institute operates as research and educational centre providing support and consulting in implementation of principles of Requisite Organization worldwide.
Jaques argued that the higher a person was positioned in a hierarchy, assuming the individual possessed a corresponding level of cognitive complexity, acquired skills and knowledge (gained through experience) and presuming that individual valued the work he or she was tasked, the longer he could work to complete a task without supervision.