What changes in the work situation might account for the increase in productivity and the decrease in controllable rejects
In making hotplates, the job was performed by a team of ten workers. Each worker assembled part of a hotplate using small tools. The teamwork was ineffective in production. The worker’s morale seemed to be low and this resulted in poor production. The management decision of scraping of teamwork and allowing individualism in the production of hotplate was responsible for improved production. When each worker assembled the entire hotplate alone, the production increased by 84% and controllable rejects decrease by 22%. Sometimes it is worthwhile to invest in team-building activities, but there are cases that teamwork may be a wasted investment.
For example, in this hotplate production, the task could be simple and repetitive making the workers have boredom and therefore become negligent in the production. The assembling tasks may have had little communication between the workers.
Therefore the workers had reduced access to information needed in production they became frustrated thereby reducing efficiency. Nevertheless, workers may be people who prefer to work independently or alone. By making independent people work as a team is reducing their effectiveness and increasing their frustration mostly if the team environment is perceived to slow them down (Drucker 2007:167). In this case, the workers preferred to work individually
What might account for the drop in absenteeism and the increase in morale?
The absenteeism of the workers may have been high during the teamwork. The reason could be that the assembly line was balanced by the engineers into subassembly tasks that needed each worker three minutes to accomplish. The time allocated to the subassembly tasks could be so little for some slow workers to cope up thereby the workers were frustrated and they absented themselves from work.
The straight hourly wages would also be little for the slow worker because the earning was based on the hours worked. With the new production method, the absenteeism would have reduced because there was no timed subassembly task. Each worker would take any time to complete a fully assembled hotplate. The worker’s speed and efficiency mattered.
What were the major changes in the situation? Which changes were under the control of the manager? Which were controlled by workers?
The teamwork production was done away with and the individual based production was put into place. The production also increased highly and the controllable rejects reduced from 23% to 1%. There before, workers’ production was rated on an hourly basis but with the change in the production method, the worker’s production was rated on the quality completed hotplates. The manager was in control of changing the production assembly line from ten workers group to a single person production. The workers were in control of increasing production and also reducing the number of controllable rejects.
What might happen if the workers went back to the old assembly line method?
In the individual assembly line, the workers have been trained in all the hotplate subassemblies. This has enabled them to gain experience in the hotplate production therefore if the workers are to become teamwork again, the production will increase and efficiency will be achieved. Likewise, the speed of giving output will improve at the new teamwork since each individual was used to high-speed production that had increased output. Because of quality production gained at the individual products, the workers will still produce a hotplate of higher quality more than even of the individual level.
Otherwise, the new group work assembly can reduce the production because some workers may feel that they are not recognized for their work and will find no reason to reach their high performance when on teams (Drucker 2007:167). Some of the workers will exert less effort on collective tasks than on individual tasks. The result will be a lack of drive to effectively produce hotplate as a team thus having a weak team with low production.
Reference
Drucker, P. (2007). The Practice of Management. New York. Elsevier publishers ltd.