(FORTUNE Magazine) – TODAY, as CEOs waken to the new dawn of participatory management and even slugabeds are heard to murmur ''empowerment'' in their sleep, there is reason to believe that their heretofore faithful retainers, the employees, would like nothing better than to push a butter knife slowly through the boss's well- intentioned heart. Relations between employer and employed are not good, and at an especially dicey moment. Just when top management wants everyone to begin swaying to a faster, more productive beat, employees are loath to dance. Observes David Sirota, chairman of the corporate polling firm Sirota Alper & Pfau: ''CEOs say, 'We're a team, we're all in this together, rah, rah, rah.' But employees look at the difference between their pay and the CEO's. They see top management's perks -- oak dining rooms and heated garages, vs. cafeterias for the hourly guys and parking spaces half a mile from the plant. And they wonder: 'Is this togetherness?' '' As the disparity in pay widens, the wonder grows. People below the acme of the corporate pyramid trust those on top just about as far as they can throw a Gulfstream IV, with shower. Hourly workers and supervisors indeed agree that ''we're all in this together,'' but what ''we're in'' turns out to be a frame of mind that mistrusts senior management's intentions, doubts its competence, and resents its self-congratulatory pay. Just about everyone who keeps tabs on employee opinion finds evidence of a trust gap. And it is widening. One example: The Hay Group, drawing on ten years of survey data -- hundreds of companies, thousands of employees -- concluded in a 1988 study that the attitudes of middle managers and professionals toward the workplace are becoming more like those of hourly workers, historically the most disaffected group. No one contends that relations between top management and everybody else are as acrid these days as, say, during the Pullman strike. Nor are today's complaints as dramatic as those of earlier generations (cave-ins, manglings, people falling into vats and being rendered into Durham's Pure Leaf Lard). Today's grievances are less salty, more subtle. But they smoke and gutter all the same -- some with a peculiar brilliance. WHAT'S THE PROBLEM? Is it just pay? Working conditions? Benefits not good enough? None of these rank high in the new pantheon of gripes. If that surprises you, you aren't alone. When Louis Harris & Associates polled office workers and their managers on behalf of the Steelcase office furniture company this year, they found a growing ''perception gap'' between what employees really want and what top management thinks they want. Managers assume, for instance, that job security is of paramount importance to employees. In fact, among workers it ranks far below such ethereal-sounding desires as respect, a higher standard of management ethics, increased recognition of employee contributions, and closer, more honest communications between employees and senior management. When Opinion Research Corp. of Chicago surveyed 100,000 middle managers, supervisors, professionals, salespeople, and technical, clerical, and hourly workers of FORTUNE 500 companies in 1988, it found the lines of communications fraying. With the exception of the sales group, employees believed top management now was less willing to listen to their problems than five years earlier. The groups also felt top management now accorded them less respect. A. Foster Higgins & Co., an employee-benefits consulting firm, finds that only 45% of large employers make regular use of worker opinion surveys, probably the most obvious means of carrying employee messages upward. Says Richard Knapp, a principal of the firm: ''Organizations audit their financial resources regularly but fail to take the temperature of their own employees.'' Such companies, he says, are ''flying blind.'' Why don't companies make greater use of surveys? Because, says Bruce Pfau, executive vice president of Sirota Alper & Pfau, some CEOs still believe that asking underlings questions is tantamount to letting them run the show. ''It's a sort of an aristocratic attitude: 'Who are you to tell me what you want? You work for me.' '' Companies that do use surveys sometimes conceal results from employees or fail to explain how policy changes are related to survey findings. Failure to follow through deepens employee cynicism: ''Management didn't want my opinion in the first place,'' employees think. ''Now they're sorry they asked.'' In September, after studying FORTUNE 500 companies' use of a wide variety of from-the-bottom-up communications tools -- including surveys, telephone hot lines, quality circles, suggestion programs, and exit interviews -- Towers Perrin, another big consulting firm, concluded that the ''open doors'' of many corporations were only ''slightly ajar.'' Not listened to, employees return the compliment. Missives from the boardroom are met increasingly with disbelief, not just by ''the little people'' but by everyone below VP. The Hay Group calls these doubters ''the fraternity of skeptics.'' Hay's director of management research, Ronald Grey, attributes the fraternity's growth to employees' mounting awareness of inconsistencies between what management says and what it does -- between saying ''People are our most important asset'' and in the next breath ordering layoffs, or between sloganeering about quality while continuing to evaluate workers by how many pieces they push out the back door. THE RESULT is a weird world in which top management thinks it's sending crucial messages, but employees never hear a word. According to a survey by the Forum Corp., a consulting firm, 82% of FORTUNE 500 executives believe their corporate strategy is understood by ''everyone who needs to know.'' Alas, Louis Harris research finds, less than a third of employees say management provides clear goals and direction. When the Hay Group asked what kind of information workers wanted more of from top management, the troops checked ''reliable information on where the company is headed'' and ''how my job fits into the total.'' Quinn Spitzer, a VP of the Kepner-Tregoe management consulting outfit, tells of visiting a big company and having an executive show him a summary of the corporate strategy. ''I said, 'This is terrific. When we discuss this with the employees I think we can really make some headway.' I wasn't proposing to share it with people on the production line, but just with middle managers. He said, 'You can't discuss this -- it's our strategy, it's confidential, and it's for the senior executive group.' '' Observes Ilene Gochman, vice president of Opinion Research: ''The days when management could say, 'Trust us, this is for your own good,' are over. Employees have seen that if the company steams off on some new strategic tack and it doesn't work, employees lose their jobs, not management.'' Left to guess their CEO's plan, many employees end up wondering whether the brass has one. Confidence in top management's competence is collapsing. Gochman found an across-the-board vote of declining confidence she calls ''just unbelievable.'' Employees aren't stupid. After holding focus groups with thousands of them, Gochman concludes that management's low ratings arise from workers' awareness of new challenges out there. ''With all the downsizing, mergers, and acquisitions, they're looking more critically at the kinds of things top management is doing,'' she says. ''Some companies have just turned themselves inside out, getting into businesses they never were in before. Respondents wonder, 'Can management pull it off?' '' When CEOs screw up and then expect subordinates to make sacrifices, resentment breeds fast. Emotionally, cold fusion is a proven reality. Competence may be hard to divine, but pay is known, and to the penny. The rate of increase in top management's compensation parted company from workers' in 1979 and hasn't looked back since. Chiefs who make 100 times the average Indian's pay are no longer rare. European and Japanese CEOs, who seldom earn more than 15 times the employee average, look on in amazement. Says William Werther, a management professor at the University of Miami: ''The gap is widening beyond what the guy at the bottom can even understand.'' BUD CRYSTAL, a compensation expert and professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, suggests the ghoulish possibility that departed middle managers may be providing the food for this feeding frenzy: ''It may be financed from the bodies of middle management. By having a leaner, meaner organization with fewer levels, the CEO -- on the seventh day he rested -- takes half the savings and puts it in his pocket.'' Donald Kanter, a Boston University marketing professor and co-author of The Cynical Americans, finds that U.S. workers are willing to accept substantial differentials in pay between corporate highs and lows. Few believe CEOs should go shoeless or that they should receive less than a just reward. But more and more, the lows -- and middles -- are asking the question: Just how just is just? Bruce Pfau notes, ''Executives never ask us to find out what employees think about executive salaries.'' So he and his partners decided to finance their own study. Of 350 employees surveyed in a random national sample, two-thirds thought CEOs got too big a share of corporate profits. Nearly half, however, believed their own share was ''about right.'' And solid majorities believed the shares going to stockholders, to the community at large, and to reinvestment were also about right. In employees' eyes, top management alone is getting more than it deserves. It doesn't help that the passengers aboard the gravy train look as if they all hail from the same gene pool. According to a Wall Street Journal survey, the average CEO of 850 of the largest U.S. companies is still a Protestant male with three or more kids. He served in the armed forces, plays golf, and has been married to the same stay-at-home woman for 20 years. He would hesitate to promote a homosexual into management. He prefers navy-blue suits with red power ties. In other words: He's somebody increasingly unlike the rest of the work force. Cosseted, closeted, whisked by limousine from home to the office, CEOs live never less than one remove from everyday annoyances. Are you hot? They are delightfully cool. Cold? They are toasty. Pale? They, by chance, are freshly back from a conference in the islands. Prick them and a man comes in to bleed. Or so it looks to the rank and file. Sometimes the distance between them and everybody else comes across in the chance remark: Citicorp Chairman John Reed brushed aside an importunate aide with, ''Can't talk now; gotta meet Jimmy Connors.'' After Time Inc. (parent of FORTUNE's publisher) acquired Warner Communications, Time's CEO, J. Richard Munro, repaired to his vacation home in upstate New York to rest. There a local reporter asked if he didn't stand to make a lot of money from the deal (some $12 million over the next ten years). ''That sounds like a lot of money unless you live in New York and live in the world I live in,'' Munro responded. ''In New York City, it's like Monopoly money.'' A ripsaw is cutting through the ties that bind: On the upstroke, economic differences are cleaving top from bottom, and on the down, shared associations are falling away. Says Miami's Werther: ''There's very little common ground left in terms of the experience of the average worker and the CEO.'' The military draft, which Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Fear of Falling, calls ''that one great class-mixing experience,'' is long gone. Meanwhile, American society, as well as its work force, becomes more polyglot. EVENTUALLY top management is likely to reflect more accurately the makeup of society. But ''eventually'' can be a long time. ''The real change,'' says Werther, ''won't come until after the turn of the century. Then you'll get the people who were born in the Sixties.'' Until then, coming hard on the heels of today's CEOs are a generation of MBAs. What doctors are to hospitals, what lawyers are to law firms, these larval CEOs may be to industry: a credentialed caste. Says Stanford business school professor Jeffrey Pfeffer of his own students: ''A lot of them think that everybody who doesn't have an MBA from Stanford, or possibly Harvard, is some lower form of life.''

What future does this trend suggest? One reminiscent of a bad B-movie: Beneath the Planet of the MBAs. Here an effete, luxury-loving, self-absorbed technocratic elite holds uneasy sway over a demoralized, poorly educated but well-built mass of workers. One day, during a squabble over whose office gets the Keith Haring print, the workers rise up. At fadeout, the MBAs are found strangled in their Hermes ties. ''Oh, come off it,'' you say. ''A business enterprise needn't be one big happy family to succeed. Aren't plenty of slave ships making good time?'' Some are. But companies seething with class discord pay a penalty in drag. ''Forget ethics,'' says David Sirota. ''These companies are dysfunctional. Top management isn't hearing what it needs to hear'' about markets, competitors, problems, and opportunities. ''They've walled themselves off.'' These companies pay another price they typically don't care to discuss. Michael Crino, professor of management at Clemson University, explains: ''If people feel somehow that their side of the scale isn't balanced with yours, they may go to extremes to balance it. If management is arrogant, if it keeps all the perks to itself when the company does well, then pushes all the disasters downhill when times are bad, then there are certain collateral behaviors you can expect to see.'' He means sabotage. Quiet desperation, it seems, went out with high-button greaves. With computers on every desk, employees with scores to settle find the weapons of vengeance ready to hand. Says Crino: ''They have the potential to do an ungodly amount of damage.'' He cites the example of an oil company employee who erased a database worth millions of dollars. Drilling and exploration were suspended until the file could be recreated. Meanwhile, old-fashioned sabotage is alive and well. ''People,'' says Crino philosophically, ''still get a thrill out of physical destruction.'' A department store employee who believed herself unfairly discharged taped razor blades between her fingers, then slashed $20,000 in overcoats before she was caught. At a fast-food restaurant, a worker secretly relieved himself in customers' iced tea, then feigned innocence when they questioned the taste. Is sabotage increasing? Signs point that way. When Crino called companies that promise sabotage protection, he says, ''They indicated they had lots of work.'' Some companies have woken up to the hidden costs of the trust gap and are experimenting with ingenious ways of sewing corporate top and bottom back together. Few CEOs have mastered the aristo-bypass, but those who have offer the following advice. Start with the obvious. Tie the financial interests of higher-ups and lower- downs closer together by making exposure to risk and to reward more equitable. When Nucor, a steel company in Charlotte, North Carolina, with $1.1 billion in sales, went through tough times, President Ken Iverson took a 60% cut in pay. ''How often do you see that?'' asks Jude Rich, president of Sibson & Co., a compensation consulting firm. ''It makes a real difference if employees see that their CEO is willing to take it in the shorts along with them.'' Herb Kelleher, CEO of Southwest Airlines, agrees. ''If there's going to be downside,'' he says, ''you should share it. When we were experiencing hard times two years ago, I went to the board and told them I wanted to cut my salary. I cut all the officers' bonuses 10%, mine 20%.'' Consider instituting profit sharing, a Scanlon Plan, gain sharing, or some ( other program that lets employees profit from their efforts. Make sure, however, that incentive compensation is linked to performance over which the beneficiaries have control. ''Corporatewide profit sharing a la Du Pont?'' sneers Rich. ''A waste of time.'' Rethink perks. Says Richard Huseman, co-author of Managing the Equity Factor and professor of management at the University of Georgia: ''Now that perquisites come under taxable income, they just don't have the same bang for executives as they used to. Yet they still have at least the same downside with the rank and file. At this point you can say they're more trouble than they're worth.'' Most companies, he says, would be better off sticking to financial rewards, which don't carry nearly the same visibility. Kelleher views perks mainly as focusing attention on the wrong things: ''Having people competing for the corner office, the Oriental rug -- it distracts you. We feel there's competition enough outside Southwest.'' LOOK AT THE OFFICE layout with an eye toward equity. While touring Sweden, Frank Becker, a Cornell professor and expert on office design, was surprised to learn that same-size offices are the norm there. He asked his hosts how they could give the same amount of space to a secretary as to an engineer. ''They looked at me like I was crazy,'' says Becker. ''They said: 'How can we hire a secretary and expect her to be committed to our company when, by the size of the office we give her, we tell her she's a second-class citizen?' ''

Union Carbide benefited from making its offices more uniform. The company's former headquarters at 270 Park Avenue, says Becker, was one of the most hierarchical, class-conscious office environments in Manhattan: ''Every rank had a different kind of ashtray, a different kind of water pitcher, different offices, different furniture. When somebody moved, you had to change all aspects of his office. It was inefficient and expensive.'' And divisive. When Carbide moved to Danbury, Connecticut, it asked what features employees wanted in the new building. None said Mark Cross wastebaskets. ''The marble- top tables went by the wayside,'' says Jim Barton, Carbide's director of general services. ''In terms of amenities, everybody had the choice of the same stuff. It was an egalitarian approach: 2,350 private offices, all the same size. No executive parking. No executive dining room.'' After the change, worker performance improved. ''No matter how you measure it -- flow of paperwork, time spent in the building by employees -- we substantially increased productivity,'' says Barton. When Becker analyzed the results, he found higher occupant satisfaction than at any building he had studied in the U.S. IN PARCELING OUT amenities, your principle first and last ought to be: Do no harm. A consultant friend of Herb Kelleher was retained by a company that wanted to know how it could create a more ''familylike'' atmosphere. The consultant told Kelleher, ''They'd read all these management books. After five minutes in their plant, I said: 'Look, there are two things you can do right off. One, take down the signs that say NO UNIFORMED EMPLOYEES BEYOND THIS POINT; and two, stop having separate Christmas parties for the blacks and whites.'' Make sure your door is really open. At Rubbermaid an employee badly needed to talk to CEO Stanley Gault. Trouble was, the man got off his shift at 5 A.M. Gault gave up an hour's sleep to be there. None of the CEOs FORTUNE interviewed for this article could recall employees ever abusing an open-door policy: They don't walk through your door unless they have to. If you don't now survey employee attitudes, start. What you find can help identify problems before they become crises. Share findings, and make sure employees know how subsequent decisions may be related to them. For CEOs who fear surveys may whip up too rich a froth of expectation, Richard Knapp of Foster Higgins offers reassurance: ''Employees by and large are reasonable people. They understand you can't do everything they want. As long as they know their views are being considered and they get some feedback from you to that effect, you will be meeting their expectations.'' Preston Trucking, a Maryland-based carrier with 1988 revenues of $594 million, uses surveys and other bottom-up communications tools to great effect. An employee suggestion program brought in 4,412 moneymaking ideas last year. Average value to the company: $300 each. This year Preston hopes to get about 5,800, or one from every employee. Explain things -- personally. While Foster Higgins finds 97% of the CEOs it surveyed believe communicating with employees has a positive impact on job satisfaction, and 79% think it benefits the bottom line, only 22% actually do it weekly or more often. Says Mark Pastin, professor of management at Arizona State University: ''You find CEOs who think the best thing about being CEO is that they don't have to mix it up with the riffraff.'' The head of an insurance company once came to Pastin with the complaint that employees weren't ''getting'' his corporate vision. Had he ever told it to them, asked Pastin? Well, yes, he'd sent out materials, the man replied. But had he talked to employees? ''You mean, did I make a video?'' asked the CEO hopefully. No, said Pastin, had he ever met with them, in a room, say? The CEO was appalled: ''You mean, sit with them in little red plastic chairs and drink coffee out of Styrofoam cups?'' He hadn't. BOB SWANSON, CEO of Genentech, the biotech pioneer, faces a special challenge: Since many of his new hires come straight from the most rarefied university laboratories, few know much about business. Some even harbor misgivings about working for a corporation. When Swanson meets with them, he explains, among other things, why it's okay to make a profit. He also imparts the company's goals and credo in a handy pocket-size brochure. When in doubt, be open. Du Pont has trimmed its global work force by 37,000 since 1982 to 140,000, yet has retained a high level of loyalty and commitment. How? By playing straight with employees and not withholding bad news until the last minute. The company believes in giving as much advance warning as possible -- two full years, in the case of one plant closing. JUDE RICH awards IBM high marks for showing ''basic respect for the individual,'' especially for taking pains to outplace IBM people. ''You don't hear people at IBM complaining about John Akers's salary,'' he says. The point here is simple reciprocity: If you behave generously toward employees, employees are more likely to respond in kind. Analysts rate Southwest's employees the most productive of any airline. Why are they? Says Kelleher: ''Because they know we aren't trying to milk them in order to swell the bottom line.'' Dallas ramp supervisor Dennis Wynn agrees. His baggage handlers regularly achieve a feat unheard-of elsewhere in the industry: ten-minute turnarounds of aircraft. ''When that plane comes in at 1:50 and you take off 200 bags and put on 200 more, and it takes off at 2:00, nobody needs to tell you you did good,'' Wynn says. In seven years with Southwest, he has been out sick once, with ulcers (''too much Cajun food''). ''But hey,'' he says, ''if I'm a little sick, if it's sleeting, I can come to work.'' Wynn gets no special bonus for these heroics, just as Preston Trucking's personnel get no bonus for the suggestions they submit. At both companies workers give their all primarily because they believe management gives them full attention and respect. Every now and then workers return the favor. Last year Chuck Dunlap, manager of Preston's Kearny, New Jersey, dock, had a problem: He wanted to save money by closing down the dock on the Friday before Christmas. But his Teamsters contract didn't recognize Friday as a holiday; he could close the dock, but 35 drivers would still have to be paid. Dunlap asked shop steward Carl Conoscenti for help. ''I'll handle it,'' said Carl. He told the drivers several things: One, that they were due the money; two, that nobody would think less of them for taking it; and three, nobody would know if they took it. None took it. ''These are Teamsters,'' says Dunlap, arms raised in disbelief. ''This is New Jersey.'' Don't disdain the hokey. This Thanksgiving, as last, Allen Paulson, CEO of Gulfstream Aerospace, will don a chef's hat and serve turkey to his employees, wishing each one well by name. And on Valentine's Day, Herb Kelleher will send out 8,200 personalized Valentines. Corny? ''Just hearing about it makes me wince,'' says Robert Levering, author of A Great Place to Work. But employees on the receiving end at these companies don't wince. Why not? Because their employers have worked hard -- for years, in some cases -- to establish their sincerity. Preston, years ago, had terrible relations between management and labor. Then, one day, top management resolved to bury the hatchet. All sorts of reforms were announced, including the Four- to-One Rule: For every criticism a manager made about a driver's performance, he had to give him four compliments. You can imagine how this went over. ''It was like a . . . like a marriage encounter,'' says Teamster Nick Costa, rolling his eyes. Eventually, though, drivers discovered that the rule really did reflect a change of heart. In 1984, when Mike Warren signed on as CEO of Alabama Gas, the biggest natural-gas distributor in that state, he found relations with the company's unions in poor repair. To show workers he meant to put the bad old days behind, Warren got a 20-foot papier-mache dinosaur, plunged a stake through its heart, and wheeled the corpse around from department to department. ''If all we'd done was go around with a papier-mache dinosaur, they'd have seen through it immediately,'' Warren says. ''The follow-through was | crucial.'' He started eating dinner regularly with union leaders. If he was out driving and saw workers laboring in a ditch, he got out and visited with them. He surveyed employees and solicited their suggestions. Two years later the steel workers' union sent Warren a brontosaurus statuette inscribed ''Dinosaur Killer of the Year.'' To Warren, their gesture said: Okay, now we believe you.

You can adopt whatever hokey touches suit your company, but CEOs agree that it is suicidal to start down this road unless you are absolutely sincere. Says Arizona State's Pastin: ''Company picnics don't mean a damn unless other factors are present.'' Such as honest communications, respectful treatment, and equitable standards of gain and sacrifice. BE AWARE that even more radical experiments are afoot. Should a CEO's compensation be set at some multiple of the average worker's? This controversial idea has been espoused by no less a troika than Peter Drucker, J. P. Morgan, and Socrates. Drucker says Morgan discovered that the poorly performing clients of J.P. Morgan & Co. had one characteristic in common: ''Each company's top executive was paid more than 130% of the compensation of the people in the next echelon, and these, in turn, more than 130% of the compensation of those below them.'' Morgan concluded that disproportionately high executive salaries disrupted teamwork. Drucker, who believes Morgan's discovery still holds true, favors a 20-to-1 ratio between CEO and average worker pay. Socrates endorsed 5 to 1. Management has not raced to embrace this idea. At present only a handful of U.S. companies use it, including Herman Miller, the $800 million furniture maker (which uses 20 to 1), and Vermont ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry's Homemade (5 to 1). John Tepper Marlin, an economist who studied Ben & Jerry's corporate culture, considers the 5-to-1 ratio a mixed blessing. While the company gets high-caliber janitors -- and while employee productivity runs high -- the ice- cream maker has had trouble attracting experienced senior managers. A year ago Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who own 34% of the stock, resolved to get women into their top-management cadre by hiring a female chief financial officer. She would receive around $70,000 a year, plus three pints of ice cream daily. After a six-month nationwide hunt, they still couldn't find one, prompting employees to dub the woman B&J's ''UFO'' (unidentified female officer). The company ended up grooming controller Fran Rathke for the job. A second radical experiment might be called sharing the sweat. It isn't immediately clear to everyone that CEOs work. Flying off in a sleek jet with an attentive aide to deliver a short talk may sound like work to you, but a cable overhauler could get used to it. Before a back injury forced Preston's Joe Ruggiero to switch from driving to an administrative job, he admits he thought guys in pink ties ''just fooled around all day.'' SOME COMPANIES see an advantage to having top management every so often labor demonstrably. In October, Hyatt Hotels dispatched its entire headquarters staff to work for a day changing sheets, pouring coffee, running elevators. President Darryl Hartley-Leonard worked as a doorman at the Hyatt in Chicago. Bill Kurvers, the full-time door captain who worked alongside him, says, ''He did very well, much to our surprise. It was a busy day -- we could use all the help we could get.'' At first Hartley-Leonard refused tips. Fellow doormen quickly set him straight. What did he get from his experience, besides tips? Says Kurvers: ''He got respect.'' And something more, Hartley-Leonard explains: ''It was the damnedest thing -- employees came up to me and shook my hand. We didn't goof around at it, and it wasn't play-acting. You forget how captured you are in a line job.'' Anything else? ''Jesus, my back aches.'' He describes the experience as a good reality check. The officers of Southwest Airlines, Kelleher included, work at least once every quarter as baggage handlers, ticket agents, and flight attendants. ''We're trying to create an understanding of the difficulties every person has on his job,'' explains Kelleher. ''When you're actually dealing with customers, and you've done the job yourself, you're in a better position to appraise the effect of some new program or policy.'' And don't forget those nice new MBAs! Lincoln Electric puts MBAs -- even ones from Harvard -- on its welding line for more than a ceremonial visit. Rob Shepard, a Harvard MBA who survived the training to become a special-projects coordinator, says: ''Those eight weeks were as tough as anything I ever had in the Marine Corps.'' President Donald Hastings, himself a Harvard MBA who went through the drill, tells why Lincoln does it: ''We want them to understand the difficulty of the factory environment and to have respect for the people out there. These MBAs have got a big target on their backs. People have to see - they aren't just traders coming in from the financial world.'' Do they sweat? ''Oh, gosh yes. Sweat just pouring off them.'' Enlightenment has it costs. Preston lost nearly 25% of its managers when it adopted the ol' Four-to-One and began listening to drivers' complaints about supervisors. Even Kelleher says, in mock exasperation, ''I don't mind their tracking dirt across my rug, but I just wish they'd stop calling me shithead in front of the customers.'' Is trying to close a trust gap worth the trouble? Bob Swanson, pointing to Genentech's low turnover and the fat pile of resumes on his desk, thinks it is. Chuck Dunlap at Preston, whose drivers bring in business and turn down pay, thinks it is. Herb Kelleher, who leaves his Mercedes parked on the edge of the runway for weeks at a time without fear anyone will scratch a set of keys across the paint, thinks it is. The point, Hyatt's Hartley-Leonard observes, is that ''employees do feel they're living in a society of equals.'' And that, as much of the American experience attests, is a pretty good feeling.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: SOURCE: SIBSON & CO. CAPTION: AS THE DISPARITY IN PAY GROWS...

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE CREDIT: SOURCE: OPINION RESEARCH CORP. CAPTION: ...EMPLOYEE CONFIDENCE ERODES