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Efficiency and the quality of worklife the technology of reconciliation
Business eficiency and quality of worklife are sometimes con@icting and sometimes complementary. Lupton advances a methodology for determining in any manufacturing situation how to strike the optimal balance between the two.
RESEARCH
THE TECHNOLOGY
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OF RECONCILIATION
Tom Lupton
here is no direct connection between the quality of worklife and business efficiency. Indeed, the challenge is to be able to specify the conditions under which an improvement (or deterioration) in the quality of worklife would be associated with an improvement (or deterioration) in business efficiency. There are many other factors at work in every case. They include, for example, product markets, material technology, and labor availability. Where there is stiff competition in product markets, where the technology is such that job enrichment is economically feasible, and where labor is readily available to fill enriched jobs, there can be great commercial advantages from investing in improvement in the quality of life. Obviously, these factors are not always present. The practical question for the manager who for whatever reason-his own conscience, public clamor, trade union pressure, or high labor turnover-is planning a program to improve the quality of worklife is:
Ian Tanner contributed more to this article and to the project described in it than his natural modesty would allow him to admit, and it is a pleasure to record my appreciation of it.
How far can I go with it and still remain efficient and competitive? Engineers and social scientists already have accumulated sufficient knowledge and experience to enable us to make some tentative answers to the question.
OPERATIONAL
DEFINITIONS
Generally, we would define a high-quality worklife as one that involved an interesting, challenging, and responsible job. It also would reward the worker with a just wage for his work and recognition of other kinds for his contribution-for example, promotion to a better-paid, more responsible position. The workplace would be light, clean, quiet, safe, and spacious. Supervision would be minimal, although support would be readily available and the worker would be involved in all the decisions that directly affect him and his job. The job would be secure, and it would provide the worker with opportunities to develop friendly relationships with his co-workers. The organization also would provide firstclass facilities for his personal welfare, medical attention, and so on.
A low-quality worklife, by contrast, would feature a short-cycle, repetitive, uninteresting, low-paying job in a dirty, noisy, cramped, and dangerous workplace in a crowded factory site. The job would be supervised and controlled closely; the worker would be cut off from friendly relationships with his fellow workers; his employment would be insecure; and the support facilities would be minimal or nonexistent-for example, no medical attention or no welfare facilities. The problem is that there is no unanimity about what constitutes a high-quality worklife-or a low-quality one. A person’s worklife experience may be so deprived that he cannot conceive what a high-quality worklife could mean. Alternatively, he may conceive it narrowly and negatively as the removal of some burdensome current unpleasantness, or he may want to see some factors given more weight than others-for example, pay rather than promotion opportunities, an interesting job rather than minimal supervision, or security above all. John Goldthorpe has reported that some automobile workers have been ready to trade off all the factors generally lumped together under the quality of worklife in return for high pay and short hours, and they compensate by conspicuously consuming away from the job. George Strauss has criticized most of the published reports of job enrichment activities for their failure to take into account cultural and personality variables. In fact, Strauss asserts, “A large proportion of the workforce seems to be instrumental in its orientation. Indeed, I suspect that for many workers, control over work time may be more attractive than control over the work itself.” “Quality of worklife,” then, refers to the characteristics of the job itself and to the circumstances under which it is performed. Is it a short-cycle, repetitive job? Does the worker have to make responsible choices ? Is
the workplace clean, light, and safe? Does the job offer opportunities for pleasant social intercourse? It is apparent that we can use this definition to describe the characteristics of a worklife and to compare one worklife with another without necessarily judging one to be better than another. It also can be used, as we have seen, to express fairly precisely what workers expect from their worklives. An employer contemplating changes can measure the effects of these changes on the jobs to be done, match these effects against the expectations and concerns of the workers, and anticipate the outcome of the changes. These points will be elaborated later on. But first, a few more terms should be defined. “Business efficiency” can be defined simply in terms of outputs and inputs. A given output of a product can be produced on a certain day by consuming resources such as manpower, materials, and power. If on another day more has been produced with the same or fewer inputs, business efficiency can be said to have increased. As in the case of quality of worklife, there are problems associated with the measurement of business eficiency, but the measures are much more highly developed-to the point, certainly, where the resources consumed in an attempt to improve the quality of worklife can be costed and compared to the benefits obtained. Since it is now possible to measure the quality of worklife and the expectations of what it ought to be (as will be demonstrated later on), we can raise the following question : Can our engineers design a product and a manufacturing system to fabricate it that will enable us to realize or exceed workers’ expectations about the quality of worklife and yet at the same time maintain a high level of business efficiency ? In our question, quality of worklife occupies an equal place with business efficiency. The elements that constitute the qual-
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ity of worklife have become weighty variables in the normal conduct of business. Top managers of our business organizations increasingly are asking this question, or a variant thereof, and there is wide popular debate on this topic in both Europe and the United States. By adding the radical view that far from being residual, or even equal in weight to other factors, the quality of life should be central to any business decision, we can identify four positions: l Position A, the “conventional position,” gives primacy to markets and profits: The employee exchanges his services for money-the beginning and practically the end of the relationship. In short, the doctrine of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” l Position B is a kind of variation of the classic Benthamite argument that somehow the greatest good for the greatest number is arrived at automatically as the sum total of the competition between equally selfish people motivated by the pain/pleasure principle-all seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Position B is based on two assumptions that, if not equally falacious, are at least equally unproven: (1) that all people have the same job expectations- the premise widely popularized by Herzberg; and (2) that management in general recognizes these expectations and structures the requirements of most jobs in ways that will satisfy them. In turn, the feeling of job satisfaction that inevitably follows from fulfillment of these expectations motivates workers to pursue the ends of business efliciency. A comforting myth for those who can embrace it. Herzberg, for one, would embrace the first part and deny the second. As he seesit, employers with correct insights into the expectations of their employees are rare, and employers with the courage of these insights are in even shorter supply. At most, the model provided by Position B will create a momen-
7‘om Lupton
is professor of organizational behavior at the Manchester Business School, Univrrszt~~ of Manchester, where he has taught since 1966. He is also deputy director of the school. .4 graduate of Oxford (1948 j with a
Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of JianChester, his previous posts include professot of industrial relations at the University of Leeds (1964 to 1966) and visiting projessor at the Umversity of Chicago in 1971. In addition, Projessor Lupton tvas chairman of the Association of Teachers of Management from 1960 to 1964 and has edited The Journal of Management Studiessince 1965. Among his published monographs are On the Shop Floor (1963), Industrial Behavior
and PersonnelManagement (1963, Management and the SocialSciences(1966), and with D. Gowuler, Selectinga Wage PaymentSystem (1969).
turn and stimulus for a movement in the desired direction. l Position C, the “radical orientation,” places quality of worklife as the central consideration. It is a goal that is to be pursued whatever the costs to business efficiency and commercial success. According to this view, the quality of worklife is an inalienable human right. If business efficiency has to be sacrificed in order to insure it, then we will have to live less comfortably as consumers but enjoy more dignified and pleasant lives as citizens/producers. If, however, human ingenuity can find ways that permit us to achieve both high quality of worklife and high business efficiency, so much the better. l Position D, the “new logic,” maintains that quality of worklife along with business efficiency are two considerations of equal weight that have to be optimized in a given business decision.
There are some loose logical ends in both Position B and Position C that we ought to identify and discuss in order to more clearly understand the “quality of life” problem. For example, some workers may be uninterested for one reason or another in the goal of business efficiency. Position B seems to assume that all of them are, wish to be, or can be persuaded to be interested. If they are interested, improving the quality of worklife would remove one obstacle to the pursuit of the goal. If they z&h to be interested, they may be encouraged by improvements in the quality of worklife to accept business efficiency as a goal. If they have to be persuaded, the promise of improvements in the quality of worklife may be an important weapon in the armory of persuasion. It is easy to assume that a rational worker will recognize that his own interests are best served by business efficiency and the commercial successof his employer. Yet surely a worker may just as rationally consider his own economic self-interest and life career as matters of prime importance and be unable to see a very clear connection between his own interests and the commercial successof a particular organization. He also may put a high priority on satisfactions at the workplace that are of his own and not of his employer’s creation. Among these may be the satisfaction of exercising, along with his co-workers, illicit control over the effort/reward relationship and workflow administration in order not only to optimize the effort/reward bargain but also to create more leisured and pleasant relationships in the workplace. Much systematic evidence exists to show that few do-ityourself improvements in the quality of worklife enhance business efficiency. In fact, such efforts typically have been described as restrictive behavior or limitation of output. This form of self- or group-generated improvements in the quality of worklife, the motives
that engender them, and the energy with which they are pursued arise, not from cupidity, but from shared beliefs about what worklife ought to be like and a desire to transform it accordingly. In summary, ideas about and behavior in relation to the quality of worklife held by employees may differ from those held by employers and managers. The ideas of both have equal validity, and to handle the conflict between them constructively where it exists may itself be regarded as a contribution to the quality of worklife-for example, by introducing participative methods of management to resolve the conflict. All of which may be regarded by an adherent of Position B as an unnecessary smokescreen obscuring what he believes to be a fundamental psychological truth-that when people’s basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and companionship have been satisfied, they seek a chance to develop their potential at work and to live a secure and civilized social life in a pleasant workplace. Therefore, a manager who understands psychology will insure that the work and the workplace are designed to cater to these higher-order human needs. It will be worth his while to do so because he will be more than repaid in loyalty and enthusiastic work. It is central to the “new logic” orientation, Position D, that what workers think, what they believe, what their life concerns are, and how they define high-quality worklife is something to be discovered only by systematic observation of their behavior on the job. Although there may be thoughts, beliefs, and concerns that are common to people of different ages, sexes, national cultures, and regions, one also will find much that is not common. For practical purposes such as designing a manufacturing system with quality of worklife in mind, it is sensible to determine as precisely as possible the actual expectations and desires of the workforce. To assume what
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Figure MAP
Market Demand
e =
Product Mix
4 _t
UF THE
1
LOGIC”
“NEW
Production Arrangements
I Job
Requirements
Job
Expectations
+
v
7,-1 Supply of People
t they must be, either by introspection or by repetition of accepted general psychological theory, can lead to unanticipated and unpalatable consequences.
Demand for Skill and Competences
Union Power
Life and Job Experience
I
MAPPING
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THE “NEW
LOGIC”
Let us begin with the workforce. Their ideas of what to expect from their work with the company by way of the effort required, the pay, the physical conditions, the supervisory system, and so on will have been shaped to some extent by experience of previous job requirements and production arrangements. Rut they could well have expectations that the job requirements have frustrated or failed to meet. On the other hand, Gowler and Legge have shown that older, long-service workers tend to modify their expectations, as a result of their experiences, to match the job requirements, the job and the man become formal job requirements to make a better match. As time passes, the experiences and the requirements, the job and the man become indistinguishable. With more junior employees, the adjustment process will not be far advanced. They may be actively unhappy about the quality of worklife on their jobs. Yet even in this case, the individual or the work group can alter the job requirements somewhat to meet their expectations-for example, by setting and maintaining a group output norm.
The point of great potential mismatch and resultant conflict is where the two logics meet-that is, at Arrow A in Figure 1. Since market demands constantly change (new products, new technologies, and new production systems emerge), job requirements themselves are subject to constant change. Equally, labor supply conditions, general social values and political ideologies, the power of unions, and the experiences of people all contribute toward changing job expectations. Arrow A depicts the area where the changes in people meet the changes in what is required of them. Suppose we are managers who are assigned in a given case to investigate what can be done to improve the quality of worklife. We can start by following each of the logics that lead to Arrow A. It should be possible to examine, given a particular mix of products, what will be the alternative possible production arrangements, and for each alternative, what the possible sets of job requirements are. The task of depicting alternative production arrangements will be a fairly straightforward one. To describe job requirements in a way that will
permit comparison of them with worker job expectations is more difficult. But we will describe how to do it below. There are two basic methods for determining job expectations. One can either use Position A criteria and assume that everyone wants his job enriched, or ought to have it enriched, and alter the job requirements accordingly. Then we can see whether the new job requirements fulfill the actual as well as the general expectations of the workers, or we can ask the contingent question: Are their existing expectations different from the ones generally assumed? This means we have to discover what these existing ones are and what they are likely to become. In any case, our goal is the same-to achieve a match of job expectations and job requirements that is consistent with business efficiency and commercial success.
CASE STUDY
The case involves a radically new design of the manufacturing systems of a large engineering company that resulted from a collaboration between engineers and social scientists. The project team consisted of two social scientists, three engineers, and one engineer-accountant. This design will not be described in detail, mainly for reasons of confidentiality and lack of space. The procedures that evolved, however, will be discussed in sufIicient detail so that anyone with a design problem can apply them. Visualize a complex product involving the assembly of hundreds of parts, some large enough to require mechanical handling, others as small as minute screws. The product is made for a mass market, and the weekly output is about 1,000. When the project began, the product was manufactured on a traditional mass-production assembly line employing 160
workers. Parts were moved from work station to work station by overhead conveyor belts and chains. Each operator had to remain at his work station, to which bins of small parts were attached, until the job was conveyed to him. He then had to complete the assembly operation within a specified, short-cycle time, after which the job moved on to the next work station in the sequence. Various versions of the same basic product were manufactured on the line, which necessitated some variations in components and operations and hence in job requirements. This meant that from time to time some workers had to be moved around on the line. Management was contemplating the construction of a complete new line with much the same capacity. The design considerations were: l Machinery now existed that would perform some operations mechanically that were currently performed manually. l Trade union power had increased. The unions were pressing for cleaner, lighter, and safer working conditions. l Management wished to go along with the current trend toward job enrichment and job enlargement, not only because of public and union pressure, but also because of a sincere desire to be progressive and do the right thing by their workers. l The rate of growth of the world market for the product had declined, and competition would become fiercer within the next few years not only in design and quality but also in price. l It would become increasingly difficult to recruit workers to work on the existing line. The specifications given to the project team were to create a design for a new line that would : A. Produce a high volume of quality products of good design at low cost.
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B. Provide working conditions that were quiet, safe, light, and airy. C. Provide enriched/enlarged jobs for workers. D. Use machinery to replace labor wherever possible on the production operations. The specifications themselves immediately raised the question whether, and to what extent, all the objectives could be achieved simultaneously. This question, of course, could only be answered after painstaking investigation and analysis. Six possible
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alternatives
The team decided that the first stage of the investigation should be to establish-initially without regard to any considerations of cost, quality, volume, mechanization, working conditions, and so on-all the possible ways in which the product could feasibly be assembled. The following alternatives were generated : 1. A single operator would assemble the whole product from its component partsthat is, there would be a number of individual work stations to which the components would be delivered and from which finished products would be collected. 2. A single operator would assemble a significant part of the product-that is, there would be a large group of operations and components providing long-cycle, varied work. Components would be delivered to the work stations and the subassemblies conveyed from station to station. 3. Small groups of workers would assemble the whole product. The arrangements for delivery of parts to and collection of products from work stations would be similar to the first alternative. The detailed arrangements for the organization of work would be left to the workers themselves. 4. Small groups of workers would assemble a significant part of the product,
enough to make a long, interesting cycle of operations and provide opportunities for job rotation within the group. The arrangements for delivery and sequencing would be the same as in the second alternative. 5. Work stations, as on the existing line, would be placed linearly, and parts would be delivered continuously by conveyors to the work stations. Some manual pacing of work would be possible. 6. A completely planned assembly line would be created; speed and manning would be determined by the speed of machines and conveyors. The processes for eliminating alternatives because of unit cost, control of quality, use of space, and so on already were familiar to the engineers and accountants on the project. If the quality of worklife had not been a factor, the team would probably have opted early on for a combination of the fifth and sixth alternatives-introduce completely mechanized sections of the line using recently developed machines that would set the operator’s pace and design the other sections according to the pattern of the existing line. The instructions, however, specified quiet, safe, light, and airy working conditions along with enriched and enlarged jobs. On first inspection, it looked as if the alternatives scoring high on business efficiency (the fifth and sixth alternatives) would be the lowest on the quality of worklife. The implications of some of the other alternatives were not clearcut and had to be examined more carefully. To make this possible, a procedure that would discriminate according to the quality of worklife dimensions as accurately as the procedures that were used to discriminate according to cost and quality control was necessary. Measuring
job characteristics
What was required was a way of measuring and comparing the kinds of jobs required by
each alternative. If the expectations and concerns of the workforce could be measured using the same instrument, the alternative providing the best match (along Arrow A in Figure 1) could then be evaluated on the basis of cost, quality control, and so on. The method chosen was adapted from Turner and Lawrence and comprised five factors: (1) variety of tools used and parts assembled; (2) autonomy-degree of freedom available to workers to organize their own tasks, vary their workplace, change duties with others, correct errors without disruption, and preassemble job components; (3) responsibility for reaching production targets without mechanical pacing or close supervision, for high-quality work, and toward others within a work group; (4). interaction-degree of opportunity for social contact with work groups (a function of the size of the group, the location of people in it, and the layout of the workplace) and freedom to arrange work schedules by group decision; and (5) completeness of task-degree to which the finished job is a recognizable entity to which workers can attach some significance and take some pride in. The five factors were used first as a basis for constructing profiles of the job requirements for each of the six alternative manufacturing systems. To make this possible, a nine-point scale was developed for each factor and rules were established for allocating a score on each for the jobs associated with the alternative manufacturing systems. The engineer’s knowledge of the way the total assembly operation was divided on the existing line-the tools used, the parts required, the location of work stations, and so on-was invaluable as a basis for indicating how scores on the scales might be allocated when these elements were put together differently. Both the engineers and the social scientists also had seen or were familiar with examples of manu-
facturing systems for similar products that resembled some of the various alternatives. All in all, it was not too difficult to secure agreement among the investigators and the managers of the plant themselves on the profiles shown in Figure 2. After examining these profiles, it would be easy to rule some of them out immediately using quality of worklife criteriathe fifth and sixth alternatives, for example. We must remember, however, that the purpose of the project was to satisfy not only quality of worklife criteria but also efficiency and commercial criteria. There was a requirement to look for opportunities to employ machines instead of people as well. Neither would it be appropriate, in terms of the “new logic” orientation to ignore the values, preferences, concerns, in short, the job expectations, of those who would have to make the new manufacturing system work. Measuring
job expectations
Once job-requirement profiles had been completed, the social scientists suggested several ways that could be used to help profile job expectations using the very same five factors. First, workers on the existing assembly line or a sample of them would be interviewed. The questions would be carefully designed to encourage people to evaluate their present jobs against jobs they previously had done themselves and had seen others doing. Second, they recommended making detailed observations of behavior on the existing line in order to discover to what extent the designed tasks, sequences, and work station locations were being altered or ignored by the operators. On the assumption that individuals will alter their environment as far as possible to reflect their preferences, the alterations would indicate the nature of these preferences. For example, unplanned job swapping might be interpreted as an indication of a desire for
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autonomy (the first and third subfactors), interaction, and variety. Third, the views of professional observers of the line-foremen and technicians-would be sought as well as the views of union officials, who represented the preferences and expectations of workers. Fourth, it seemed desirable to ascertain areas of agreement among experienced and wellinformed managers about the directions in which the expectations of operators would be likely to change over the period during which the new assembly line would be built and operated. Finally, predictions would be made on the basis of the best available information about the extent to which legislation, union pressure, or public opinion would push employers to improve the quality of worklife. In the end, because of lack of time, shortage of skilled interviewers, fiscal restraint, and managerial apprehensions about disturbing “sleeping dogs,” no shop-floor interviews were conducted. The more radical alternative of involving the workers themselves in the design of the new line was regarded as so tangential to the traditional culture and power distribution of the firm that it was never seriously considered. Close observations of the line were made and showed evidence of unplanned job swapping, working “up the line” (a short-run variation of job swapping), deploying tools and components, and so on. Lengthy interviews with managers and foremen were conducted in order to tap their own previous experience as operators (where appropriate) and their views on the expectations of their subordinates. A group of senior managers were asked to record systematically their opinions about the present and future tendencies in the political environment and their effect on quality-of-worklife demands, and they showed close agreement. As Figure 3 shows, there is some dis-
crepancy in the scores between the different sources. The foreman took the view that because, on the whole, people had adjusted to the work on the present assembly lines, they would not expect much more than the line had offered them by way of quality of worklife. The workers, they thought, would consider it an improvement in worklife to be given more opportunities for social interaction than their present jobs gave them. Senior managers thought that workers, given a choice, would prefer jobs with profiles well over to the right, and they considered that pressure from unions and the government and public opinion generally would strengthen those preferences. In addition, observations of the line by the project team produced a profile well over to the right. How do we explain the discrepancy in views between the foremen and the senior managers? All the foremen previously had worked on the assembly line. They had adjusted to things as they were, and they were inclined to project their orientations on the younger (male) workers on the assembly line. The senior managers were more attuned to both changing union sentiments and the impact that education and the mass media were likely to have on worker sentiments and expectations. Matching the profiles of job expectations with the profiles of job requirements of the five manufacturing systems as in Figure 3 reveals that the best match now and in the future is with the third and fourth alternatives (having small groups complete the whole assembly or large parts of it). The match is poor for the fifth and sixth systems. Except for the interaction scores, the match also is good for the first and second systems. Choosing the “best” alternative At this stage of the investigation, the first and second systems were ruled out as being too
Figure JOB REQUIREMENTS
1. One Operator-Completes LOW 1
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Line-Conveyor
LOW 1
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SYSTEMS
2. One Operator -Completes 7
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Whole Assembly
Delivery 3
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FOR ALTERNATIVE
4. Groups -Complete 7
(But Some Operator Pacwg) 5
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Figure JOB EXPECTATIONS
Large Subassembly
Large Subassembly 4
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Paced Hi-ah
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FM-0 = Observations by the project team (note: no score on Task F = Foremen’s opinion M = Managerial judgments and estimates of trends
Identity)
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costly and impractical. Analysis revealed high costs arising from recruitment and training and replacement of operators and difficulties in achieving uniformly high quality. These alternatives also ruled out high-volume output and uniform operator performance, were wasteful of space, and so on. They scored poorly on the criterion of business efficiency. The fifth and sixth alternatives were not ruled out entirely. Although their job-requirements profiles were a poor match with job expectations, it was considered best to leave them in because of their potentially high businessefficiency scores and because the project required considering the introduction of laborsaving equipment. At this point, the engineers began to prepare plans of the third, fourth, and sixth systems (the fifth was familiar since it was a close approximation to the original line) and to work out, among other things, the space requirements for high volume; the costs of equipment; the rate of return on investment; the availability of tested, mechanized methods; and the amenability of the systems to the control of quality and to variation of models. It became clear that although the third system was possible to construct and work and would score the highest on the quality of worklife, it could not be reconciled with the degree and kind of mechanization that was sought for reasons of efficiency. The fourth system was a less than perfect fit also for the same reasons. The sixth system was not possible in its entirety because much less than half the operations on the line could be mechanized. Also, there were manual operations that would have to be performed that would score extremely low on all the five criteria-that is, low-variety, short-cycle, completely machine-paced jobs. Trying to reconcile the conflicting pulls between efficiency and quality-of-work-
life considerations and also keeping in mind the need to ensure that the workplace be as spacious, light, quiet, and well-ventilated as possible, the engineers found that they could make changes in the design of the new products that would : l Improve the performance of the product and also make possible the mechanization of some operations. l Eliminate some operations altogether. l Make it possible to alter the sequence of assembly without altering in any way the quality and marketability of the product. It was possible to devise a new manufacturing system in which certain sequences were performed completely automatically while others were performed by small groups with considerable scope for organizing their own work. The mechanized and group assembly areas could be separated from each other but linked into a smooth work flow by ingeniously designed devices for moving the product from work station to work station. The new line also could be designed economically to provide a good work environment. Unfortunately, although this alternative-a mixture of the fourth and sixth systems-scored high on quality of worklife, ease of operation, utilization of mechanical equipment, and low cost, it was marred by the existence of a few unmechanizable, shortcycle, machine-paced, low quality-of-worklife jobs. These jobs could have been eliminated at extra costs and by abandoning some of the labor-saving possibilities on the line. However, this was not the decision. Instead, it was assumed that more mechanized methods would eventually be discovered that would eliminate the remaining nasty jobs. Meanwhile, workers could be paid well to do these jobs. The compromise between the fourth and sixth alterna-
tives was judged to be the best possible solution to the problem of optimizing the quality of worklife and business elliciency. Out of the 150 workers contemplated under the new system, 90 percent would have alternative-four jobs. For all of them, the new jobs would be much richer than the old. Even so, the social scientists on the team did not agree that the final compromise constituted the best possible solution. The company’s engineers insisted that mechanization take precedence over quality-of-worklife considerations; hence the rump of machine-paced, short-cycle jobs. Another feasible version of the fourth alternative exists-and is fully costed-that foregoes a small measure of mechanization in favor of further improvements in the quality of worklife. It will be two years before the new system goes into operation. There is still a possibility, although fairly remote, that the fourth alternative system will be the ultimate choice.
CONCLUSIONS
The engineers on this project found that their engineering skills and ingenuity were severely tested by the necessity of finding technical solutions within the constraints posed by quality-of-worklife considerations, and they enjoyed being tested. The social scientists faced the challenge of helping to find systematic ways of introducing quality-of-worklife considerations into the process of manufacturing design and the unusual experience of seeing a process they had a part in designing first appear as blueprints and eventually as steel and concrete. The managers of the company who commissioned the study are now more aware that in most problems of organizational design, the design criteria are multiple and
competing. They have learned that the process of working out the trade-offs that have to be made is a complicated one, but that done logically and systematically, it need not consume inordinate time and cost. It was about six months from the initial analysis of the existing assembly operations to the acceptance of the final recommendation from the project team. In this article, we have sketched the outlines of a basic logic and method. Admittedly, the methodology as practiced contained a serious flaw. As devices for measuring the job expectations of employees, on-line observations by the project team and the opinions of the foremen and higher management were less than satisfactory substitutes for the direct testimony of the workers themselves. A less fearful management would have permitted the gathering of more valid evidence. We suspect that interviews with the workers would have resulted in a profile closer to those evolved by the project team and senior management than the profile developed from the foremen’s opinions. But we have no sure way of knowing. The application of a similar or improved methodology (improved by including employee interviews) for reconciling quality of worklife and considerations of efficiency may have resulted, under different circumstances, in a vastly different outcome. We should remember that the firm in this study faced a competitive bind: The world market for its product was declining while competitive pressures were intensifying. To survive, let alone prosper, the firm had to be very efficient. In other words, conditions in the external environment did not permit the firm to weight quality-of-worklife factors equally with considerations of efficiency. The efforts to improve the quality of worklife were more preventive than remedial:
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There was little evidence of employee dissatisfaction with jobs as they were; rather, it was largely a case of trying to anticipate future dissatisfactions and heading them off before they began to seriously impair efficiency. In designing its now famous assembly plant at Kalmar, Volvo, for example, went all out for the fourth alternative and in the process incurred substantial additional costs-at least 10 percent more than would have been involved in a traditional assembly-line operation. But Volvo was reacting to the challenge of a 40 percent annual turnover rate and, even less bearable, an absentee rate that typically ran from 20 to 25 percent. To rectify these conditions was the principal motive behind Volvo’s effort to improve the quality of worklife in its new as well as its existing plants. Problems with employees in our firm were less, and the remedies adopted, quite appropriately, were not as drastic. Whether the company would have believed that it could
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afford a more economically costly alternative if employee dissatisfactions had been greater is a moot question. Probably not. However, we can? be certain. We think the project has demonstrated the potential for a fruitful collaboration between engineers and social scientists in designing or redesigning a manufacturing system. Traditionally, the problem has been that both parties have taken a black-and-white approach to the problems involved. Furthermore, what was white to the engineers was black to the social scientists, and vice versa. Most engineers viewed the problem from Position A, most social scientists from Position C. Diametrically opposed positions afforded little hope for compromise or effective collaboration. This article has described the outlines of the contingency model, Position C, and the potentialities of the tools used in conjunction with it. At most, it should persuade some to engage in similar practical experiments. At
least, it should contribute to clarifying nature of the quality-of-worklife problem manufacturing.
SELECTED
the in
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The earlier publications of mine, On the Shop (Pergamon Press, 1963) and “Organizational Change-Top Down or Bottom Up Management” (Personnel Review, October 1971), shed some light on the relationship between efficiency and the quality of worklife. The earlier book, based on observations in two workshops, mustered empirical evidence to test the theory that explains the relationship between technology, work-group power and control, and operation of reward systems. The article argued that change can be managed successfully only to the extent that it is preceded by a diagnosis that takes full account of the operator’s knowledge, perceptions, and concerns and incorporates these into the plans for change. The method used for determining what the employees’ expected from their worklives was adapted from Arthur Turner and Paul Lawrence’s Industrial jobs and the Worker (Harvard University, Division of Research, 1965). Fred Herzberg’s contention that the only real motivatars and satisfiers are the inherent characteristics of the job itself was set forth in The Motivation to Work (Wiley, 1959). For a critical comment, see my paper “ ‘Best Fit’ in the Design of Organizations” (Personnel Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1975). D. Gowler and K. Legge developed the idea of the gradual accommodation to and acceptance by workers of the conditions under which they work in “Occupational Role Development” (Personnel Review, June and November 1972). Last, there is the two-volume work, The Quality of Work Life, edited by Louis Davis and Albert Cherns, that soon will be published by The Free Press; it will include discussions of just about every facet of the problem by an assemblage of experts. Floor
RESEARCH
THE TECHNOLOGY
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OF RECONCILIATION
Tom Lupton
here is no direct connection between the quality of worklife and business efficiency. Indeed, the challenge is to be able to specify the conditions under which an improvement (or deterioration) in the quality of worklife would be associated with an improvement (or deterioration) in business efficiency. There are many other factors at work in every case. They include, for example, product markets, material technology, and labor availability. Where there is stiff competition in product markets, where the technology is such that job enrichment is economically feasible, and where labor is readily available to fill enriched jobs, there can be great commercial advantages from investing in improvement in the quality of life. Obviously, these factors are not always present. The practical question for the manager who for whatever reason-his own conscience, public clamor, trade union pressure, or high labor turnover-is planning a program to improve the quality of worklife is:
Ian Tanner contributed more to this article and to the project described in it than his natural modesty would allow him to admit, and it is a pleasure to record my appreciation of it.
How far can I go with it and still remain efficient and competitive? Engineers and social scientists already have accumulated sufficient knowledge and experience to enable us to make some tentative answers to the question.
OPERATIONAL
DEFINITIONS
Generally, we would define a high-quality worklife as one that involved an interesting, challenging, and responsible job. It also would reward the worker with a just wage for his work and recognition of other kinds for his contribution-for example, promotion to a better-paid, more responsible position. The workplace would be light, clean, quiet, safe, and spacious. Supervision would be minimal, although support would be readily available and the worker would be involved in all the decisions that directly affect him and his job. The job would be secure, and it would provide the worker with opportunities to develop friendly relationships with his co-workers. The organization also would provide firstclass facilities for his personal welfare, medical attention, and so on.
A low-quality worklife, by contrast, would feature a short-cycle, repetitive, uninteresting, low-paying job in a dirty, noisy, cramped, and dangerous workplace in a crowded factory site. The job would be supervised and controlled closely; the worker would be cut off from friendly relationships with his fellow workers; his employment would be insecure; and the support facilities would be minimal or nonexistent-for example, no medical attention or no welfare facilities. The problem is that there is no unanimity about what constitutes a high-quality worklife-or a low-quality one. A person’s worklife experience may be so deprived that he cannot conceive what a high-quality worklife could mean. Alternatively, he may conceive it narrowly and negatively as the removal of some burdensome current unpleasantness, or he may want to see some factors given more weight than others-for example, pay rather than promotion opportunities, an interesting job rather than minimal supervision, or security above all. John Goldthorpe has reported that some automobile workers have been ready to trade off all the factors generally lumped together under the quality of worklife in return for high pay and short hours, and they compensate by conspicuously consuming away from the job. George Strauss has criticized most of the published reports of job enrichment activities for their failure to take into account cultural and personality variables. In fact, Strauss asserts, “A large proportion of the workforce seems to be instrumental in its orientation. Indeed, I suspect that for many workers, control over work time may be more attractive than control over the work itself.” “Quality of worklife,” then, refers to the characteristics of the job itself and to the circumstances under which it is performed. Is it a short-cycle, repetitive job? Does the worker have to make responsible choices ? Is
the workplace clean, light, and safe? Does the job offer opportunities for pleasant social intercourse? It is apparent that we can use this definition to describe the characteristics of a worklife and to compare one worklife with another without necessarily judging one to be better than another. It also can be used, as we have seen, to express fairly precisely what workers expect from their worklives. An employer contemplating changes can measure the effects of these changes on the jobs to be done, match these effects against the expectations and concerns of the workers, and anticipate the outcome of the changes. These points will be elaborated later on. But first, a few more terms should be defined. “Business efficiency” can be defined simply in terms of outputs and inputs. A given output of a product can be produced on a certain day by consuming resources such as manpower, materials, and power. If on another day more has been produced with the same or fewer inputs, business efficiency can be said to have increased. As in the case of quality of worklife, there are problems associated with the measurement of business eficiency, but the measures are much more highly developed-to the point, certainly, where the resources consumed in an attempt to improve the quality of worklife can be costed and compared to the benefits obtained. Since it is now possible to measure the quality of worklife and the expectations of what it ought to be (as will be demonstrated later on), we can raise the following question : Can our engineers design a product and a manufacturing system to fabricate it that will enable us to realize or exceed workers’ expectations about the quality of worklife and yet at the same time maintain a high level of business efficiency ? In our question, quality of worklife occupies an equal place with business efficiency. The elements that constitute the qual-
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ity of worklife have become weighty variables in the normal conduct of business. Top managers of our business organizations increasingly are asking this question, or a variant thereof, and there is wide popular debate on this topic in both Europe and the United States. By adding the radical view that far from being residual, or even equal in weight to other factors, the quality of life should be central to any business decision, we can identify four positions: l Position A, the “conventional position,” gives primacy to markets and profits: The employee exchanges his services for money-the beginning and practically the end of the relationship. In short, the doctrine of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.” l Position B is a kind of variation of the classic Benthamite argument that somehow the greatest good for the greatest number is arrived at automatically as the sum total of the competition between equally selfish people motivated by the pain/pleasure principle-all seek to pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Position B is based on two assumptions that, if not equally falacious, are at least equally unproven: (1) that all people have the same job expectations- the premise widely popularized by Herzberg; and (2) that management in general recognizes these expectations and structures the requirements of most jobs in ways that will satisfy them. In turn, the feeling of job satisfaction that inevitably follows from fulfillment of these expectations motivates workers to pursue the ends of business efliciency. A comforting myth for those who can embrace it. Herzberg, for one, would embrace the first part and deny the second. As he seesit, employers with correct insights into the expectations of their employees are rare, and employers with the courage of these insights are in even shorter supply. At most, the model provided by Position B will create a momen-
7‘om Lupton
is professor of organizational behavior at the Manchester Business School, Univrrszt~~ of Manchester, where he has taught since 1966. He is also deputy director of the school. .4 graduate of Oxford (1948 j with a
Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of JianChester, his previous posts include professot of industrial relations at the University of Leeds (1964 to 1966) and visiting projessor at the Umversity of Chicago in 1971. In addition, Projessor Lupton tvas chairman of the Association of Teachers of Management from 1960 to 1964 and has edited The Journal of Management Studiessince 1965. Among his published monographs are On the Shop Floor (1963), Industrial Behavior
and PersonnelManagement (1963, Management and the SocialSciences(1966), and with D. Gowuler, Selectinga Wage PaymentSystem (1969).
turn and stimulus for a movement in the desired direction. l Position C, the “radical orientation,” places quality of worklife as the central consideration. It is a goal that is to be pursued whatever the costs to business efficiency and commercial success. According to this view, the quality of worklife is an inalienable human right. If business efficiency has to be sacrificed in order to insure it, then we will have to live less comfortably as consumers but enjoy more dignified and pleasant lives as citizens/producers. If, however, human ingenuity can find ways that permit us to achieve both high quality of worklife and high business efficiency, so much the better. l Position D, the “new logic,” maintains that quality of worklife along with business efficiency are two considerations of equal weight that have to be optimized in a given business decision.
There are some loose logical ends in both Position B and Position C that we ought to identify and discuss in order to more clearly understand the “quality of life” problem. For example, some workers may be uninterested for one reason or another in the goal of business efficiency. Position B seems to assume that all of them are, wish to be, or can be persuaded to be interested. If they are interested, improving the quality of worklife would remove one obstacle to the pursuit of the goal. If they z&h to be interested, they may be encouraged by improvements in the quality of worklife to accept business efficiency as a goal. If they have to be persuaded, the promise of improvements in the quality of worklife may be an important weapon in the armory of persuasion. It is easy to assume that a rational worker will recognize that his own interests are best served by business efficiency and the commercial successof his employer. Yet surely a worker may just as rationally consider his own economic self-interest and life career as matters of prime importance and be unable to see a very clear connection between his own interests and the commercial successof a particular organization. He also may put a high priority on satisfactions at the workplace that are of his own and not of his employer’s creation. Among these may be the satisfaction of exercising, along with his co-workers, illicit control over the effort/reward relationship and workflow administration in order not only to optimize the effort/reward bargain but also to create more leisured and pleasant relationships in the workplace. Much systematic evidence exists to show that few do-ityourself improvements in the quality of worklife enhance business efficiency. In fact, such efforts typically have been described as restrictive behavior or limitation of output. This form of self- or group-generated improvements in the quality of worklife, the motives
that engender them, and the energy with which they are pursued arise, not from cupidity, but from shared beliefs about what worklife ought to be like and a desire to transform it accordingly. In summary, ideas about and behavior in relation to the quality of worklife held by employees may differ from those held by employers and managers. The ideas of both have equal validity, and to handle the conflict between them constructively where it exists may itself be regarded as a contribution to the quality of worklife-for example, by introducing participative methods of management to resolve the conflict. All of which may be regarded by an adherent of Position B as an unnecessary smokescreen obscuring what he believes to be a fundamental psychological truth-that when people’s basic needs for food, clothing, shelter, and companionship have been satisfied, they seek a chance to develop their potential at work and to live a secure and civilized social life in a pleasant workplace. Therefore, a manager who understands psychology will insure that the work and the workplace are designed to cater to these higher-order human needs. It will be worth his while to do so because he will be more than repaid in loyalty and enthusiastic work. It is central to the “new logic” orientation, Position D, that what workers think, what they believe, what their life concerns are, and how they define high-quality worklife is something to be discovered only by systematic observation of their behavior on the job. Although there may be thoughts, beliefs, and concerns that are common to people of different ages, sexes, national cultures, and regions, one also will find much that is not common. For practical purposes such as designing a manufacturing system with quality of worklife in mind, it is sensible to determine as precisely as possible the actual expectations and desires of the workforce. To assume what
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Figure MAP
Market Demand
e =
Product Mix
4 _t
UF THE
1
LOGIC”
“NEW
Production Arrangements
I Job
Requirements
Job
Expectations
+
v
7,-1 Supply of People
t they must be, either by introspection or by repetition of accepted general psychological theory, can lead to unanticipated and unpalatable consequences.
Demand for Skill and Competences
Union Power
Life and Job Experience
I
MAPPING
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THE “NEW
LOGIC”
Let us begin with the workforce. Their ideas of what to expect from their work with the company by way of the effort required, the pay, the physical conditions, the supervisory system, and so on will have been shaped to some extent by experience of previous job requirements and production arrangements. Rut they could well have expectations that the job requirements have frustrated or failed to meet. On the other hand, Gowler and Legge have shown that older, long-service workers tend to modify their expectations, as a result of their experiences, to match the job requirements, the job and the man become formal job requirements to make a better match. As time passes, the experiences and the requirements, the job and the man become indistinguishable. With more junior employees, the adjustment process will not be far advanced. They may be actively unhappy about the quality of worklife on their jobs. Yet even in this case, the individual or the work group can alter the job requirements somewhat to meet their expectations-for example, by setting and maintaining a group output norm.
The point of great potential mismatch and resultant conflict is where the two logics meet-that is, at Arrow A in Figure 1. Since market demands constantly change (new products, new technologies, and new production systems emerge), job requirements themselves are subject to constant change. Equally, labor supply conditions, general social values and political ideologies, the power of unions, and the experiences of people all contribute toward changing job expectations. Arrow A depicts the area where the changes in people meet the changes in what is required of them. Suppose we are managers who are assigned in a given case to investigate what can be done to improve the quality of worklife. We can start by following each of the logics that lead to Arrow A. It should be possible to examine, given a particular mix of products, what will be the alternative possible production arrangements, and for each alternative, what the possible sets of job requirements are. The task of depicting alternative production arrangements will be a fairly straightforward one. To describe job requirements in a way that will
permit comparison of them with worker job expectations is more difficult. But we will describe how to do it below. There are two basic methods for determining job expectations. One can either use Position A criteria and assume that everyone wants his job enriched, or ought to have it enriched, and alter the job requirements accordingly. Then we can see whether the new job requirements fulfill the actual as well as the general expectations of the workers, or we can ask the contingent question: Are their existing expectations different from the ones generally assumed? This means we have to discover what these existing ones are and what they are likely to become. In any case, our goal is the same-to achieve a match of job expectations and job requirements that is consistent with business efficiency and commercial success.
CASE STUDY
The case involves a radically new design of the manufacturing systems of a large engineering company that resulted from a collaboration between engineers and social scientists. The project team consisted of two social scientists, three engineers, and one engineer-accountant. This design will not be described in detail, mainly for reasons of confidentiality and lack of space. The procedures that evolved, however, will be discussed in sufIicient detail so that anyone with a design problem can apply them. Visualize a complex product involving the assembly of hundreds of parts, some large enough to require mechanical handling, others as small as minute screws. The product is made for a mass market, and the weekly output is about 1,000. When the project began, the product was manufactured on a traditional mass-production assembly line employing 160
workers. Parts were moved from work station to work station by overhead conveyor belts and chains. Each operator had to remain at his work station, to which bins of small parts were attached, until the job was conveyed to him. He then had to complete the assembly operation within a specified, short-cycle time, after which the job moved on to the next work station in the sequence. Various versions of the same basic product were manufactured on the line, which necessitated some variations in components and operations and hence in job requirements. This meant that from time to time some workers had to be moved around on the line. Management was contemplating the construction of a complete new line with much the same capacity. The design considerations were: l Machinery now existed that would perform some operations mechanically that were currently performed manually. l Trade union power had increased. The unions were pressing for cleaner, lighter, and safer working conditions. l Management wished to go along with the current trend toward job enrichment and job enlargement, not only because of public and union pressure, but also because of a sincere desire to be progressive and do the right thing by their workers. l The rate of growth of the world market for the product had declined, and competition would become fiercer within the next few years not only in design and quality but also in price. l It would become increasingly difficult to recruit workers to work on the existing line. The specifications given to the project team were to create a design for a new line that would : A. Produce a high volume of quality products of good design at low cost.
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B. Provide working conditions that were quiet, safe, light, and airy. C. Provide enriched/enlarged jobs for workers. D. Use machinery to replace labor wherever possible on the production operations. The specifications themselves immediately raised the question whether, and to what extent, all the objectives could be achieved simultaneously. This question, of course, could only be answered after painstaking investigation and analysis. Six possible
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alternatives
The team decided that the first stage of the investigation should be to establish-initially without regard to any considerations of cost, quality, volume, mechanization, working conditions, and so on-all the possible ways in which the product could feasibly be assembled. The following alternatives were generated : 1. A single operator would assemble the whole product from its component partsthat is, there would be a number of individual work stations to which the components would be delivered and from which finished products would be collected. 2. A single operator would assemble a significant part of the product-that is, there would be a large group of operations and components providing long-cycle, varied work. Components would be delivered to the work stations and the subassemblies conveyed from station to station. 3. Small groups of workers would assemble the whole product. The arrangements for delivery of parts to and collection of products from work stations would be similar to the first alternative. The detailed arrangements for the organization of work would be left to the workers themselves. 4. Small groups of workers would assemble a significant part of the product,
enough to make a long, interesting cycle of operations and provide opportunities for job rotation within the group. The arrangements for delivery and sequencing would be the same as in the second alternative. 5. Work stations, as on the existing line, would be placed linearly, and parts would be delivered continuously by conveyors to the work stations. Some manual pacing of work would be possible. 6. A completely planned assembly line would be created; speed and manning would be determined by the speed of machines and conveyors. The processes for eliminating alternatives because of unit cost, control of quality, use of space, and so on already were familiar to the engineers and accountants on the project. If the quality of worklife had not been a factor, the team would probably have opted early on for a combination of the fifth and sixth alternatives-introduce completely mechanized sections of the line using recently developed machines that would set the operator’s pace and design the other sections according to the pattern of the existing line. The instructions, however, specified quiet, safe, light, and airy working conditions along with enriched and enlarged jobs. On first inspection, it looked as if the alternatives scoring high on business efficiency (the fifth and sixth alternatives) would be the lowest on the quality of worklife. The implications of some of the other alternatives were not clearcut and had to be examined more carefully. To make this possible, a procedure that would discriminate according to the quality of worklife dimensions as accurately as the procedures that were used to discriminate according to cost and quality control was necessary. Measuring
job characteristics
What was required was a way of measuring and comparing the kinds of jobs required by
each alternative. If the expectations and concerns of the workforce could be measured using the same instrument, the alternative providing the best match (along Arrow A in Figure 1) could then be evaluated on the basis of cost, quality control, and so on. The method chosen was adapted from Turner and Lawrence and comprised five factors: (1) variety of tools used and parts assembled; (2) autonomy-degree of freedom available to workers to organize their own tasks, vary their workplace, change duties with others, correct errors without disruption, and preassemble job components; (3) responsibility for reaching production targets without mechanical pacing or close supervision, for high-quality work, and toward others within a work group; (4). interaction-degree of opportunity for social contact with work groups (a function of the size of the group, the location of people in it, and the layout of the workplace) and freedom to arrange work schedules by group decision; and (5) completeness of task-degree to which the finished job is a recognizable entity to which workers can attach some significance and take some pride in. The five factors were used first as a basis for constructing profiles of the job requirements for each of the six alternative manufacturing systems. To make this possible, a nine-point scale was developed for each factor and rules were established for allocating a score on each for the jobs associated with the alternative manufacturing systems. The engineer’s knowledge of the way the total assembly operation was divided on the existing line-the tools used, the parts required, the location of work stations, and so on-was invaluable as a basis for indicating how scores on the scales might be allocated when these elements were put together differently. Both the engineers and the social scientists also had seen or were familiar with examples of manu-
facturing systems for similar products that resembled some of the various alternatives. All in all, it was not too difficult to secure agreement among the investigators and the managers of the plant themselves on the profiles shown in Figure 2. After examining these profiles, it would be easy to rule some of them out immediately using quality of worklife criteriathe fifth and sixth alternatives, for example. We must remember, however, that the purpose of the project was to satisfy not only quality of worklife criteria but also efficiency and commercial criteria. There was a requirement to look for opportunities to employ machines instead of people as well. Neither would it be appropriate, in terms of the “new logic” orientation to ignore the values, preferences, concerns, in short, the job expectations, of those who would have to make the new manufacturing system work. Measuring
job expectations
Once job-requirement profiles had been completed, the social scientists suggested several ways that could be used to help profile job expectations using the very same five factors. First, workers on the existing assembly line or a sample of them would be interviewed. The questions would be carefully designed to encourage people to evaluate their present jobs against jobs they previously had done themselves and had seen others doing. Second, they recommended making detailed observations of behavior on the existing line in order to discover to what extent the designed tasks, sequences, and work station locations were being altered or ignored by the operators. On the assumption that individuals will alter their environment as far as possible to reflect their preferences, the alterations would indicate the nature of these preferences. For example, unplanned job swapping might be interpreted as an indication of a desire for
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autonomy (the first and third subfactors), interaction, and variety. Third, the views of professional observers of the line-foremen and technicians-would be sought as well as the views of union officials, who represented the preferences and expectations of workers. Fourth, it seemed desirable to ascertain areas of agreement among experienced and wellinformed managers about the directions in which the expectations of operators would be likely to change over the period during which the new assembly line would be built and operated. Finally, predictions would be made on the basis of the best available information about the extent to which legislation, union pressure, or public opinion would push employers to improve the quality of worklife. In the end, because of lack of time, shortage of skilled interviewers, fiscal restraint, and managerial apprehensions about disturbing “sleeping dogs,” no shop-floor interviews were conducted. The more radical alternative of involving the workers themselves in the design of the new line was regarded as so tangential to the traditional culture and power distribution of the firm that it was never seriously considered. Close observations of the line were made and showed evidence of unplanned job swapping, working “up the line” (a short-run variation of job swapping), deploying tools and components, and so on. Lengthy interviews with managers and foremen were conducted in order to tap their own previous experience as operators (where appropriate) and their views on the expectations of their subordinates. A group of senior managers were asked to record systematically their opinions about the present and future tendencies in the political environment and their effect on quality-of-worklife demands, and they showed close agreement. As Figure 3 shows, there is some dis-
crepancy in the scores between the different sources. The foreman took the view that because, on the whole, people had adjusted to the work on the present assembly lines, they would not expect much more than the line had offered them by way of quality of worklife. The workers, they thought, would consider it an improvement in worklife to be given more opportunities for social interaction than their present jobs gave them. Senior managers thought that workers, given a choice, would prefer jobs with profiles well over to the right, and they considered that pressure from unions and the government and public opinion generally would strengthen those preferences. In addition, observations of the line by the project team produced a profile well over to the right. How do we explain the discrepancy in views between the foremen and the senior managers? All the foremen previously had worked on the assembly line. They had adjusted to things as they were, and they were inclined to project their orientations on the younger (male) workers on the assembly line. The senior managers were more attuned to both changing union sentiments and the impact that education and the mass media were likely to have on worker sentiments and expectations. Matching the profiles of job expectations with the profiles of job requirements of the five manufacturing systems as in Figure 3 reveals that the best match now and in the future is with the third and fourth alternatives (having small groups complete the whole assembly or large parts of it). The match is poor for the fifth and sixth systems. Except for the interaction scores, the match also is good for the first and second systems. Choosing the “best” alternative At this stage of the investigation, the first and second systems were ruled out as being too
Figure JOB REQUIREMENTS
1. One Operator-Completes LOW 1
2
3
5. Assembly
2
3
Line-Conveyor
LOW 1
2
5
6
4
4
5
6
SYSTEMS
2. One Operator -Completes 7
8
High 9
8
Hl‘ah Q-
LOW 1
High 9
LOW 1
Whole Assembly
Delivery 3
MANUFACTURING
Whole Assembly
4
3. Groups -Complete LOW 1
2
FOR ALTERNATIVE
4. Groups -Complete 7
(But Some Operator Pacwg) 5
6
7
8
2
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6. Assembly
Figure JOB EXPECTATIONS
Large Subassembly
Large Subassembly 4
5
Line-Machine
6
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High 9
Paced Hi-ah
2
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3 TABLE High
F
OM--+
FM-0 = Observations by the project team (note: no score on Task F = Foremen’s opinion M = Managerial judgments and estimates of trends
Identity)
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costly and impractical. Analysis revealed high costs arising from recruitment and training and replacement of operators and difficulties in achieving uniformly high quality. These alternatives also ruled out high-volume output and uniform operator performance, were wasteful of space, and so on. They scored poorly on the criterion of business efficiency. The fifth and sixth alternatives were not ruled out entirely. Although their job-requirements profiles were a poor match with job expectations, it was considered best to leave them in because of their potentially high businessefficiency scores and because the project required considering the introduction of laborsaving equipment. At this point, the engineers began to prepare plans of the third, fourth, and sixth systems (the fifth was familiar since it was a close approximation to the original line) and to work out, among other things, the space requirements for high volume; the costs of equipment; the rate of return on investment; the availability of tested, mechanized methods; and the amenability of the systems to the control of quality and to variation of models. It became clear that although the third system was possible to construct and work and would score the highest on the quality of worklife, it could not be reconciled with the degree and kind of mechanization that was sought for reasons of efficiency. The fourth system was a less than perfect fit also for the same reasons. The sixth system was not possible in its entirety because much less than half the operations on the line could be mechanized. Also, there were manual operations that would have to be performed that would score extremely low on all the five criteria-that is, low-variety, short-cycle, completely machine-paced jobs. Trying to reconcile the conflicting pulls between efficiency and quality-of-work-
life considerations and also keeping in mind the need to ensure that the workplace be as spacious, light, quiet, and well-ventilated as possible, the engineers found that they could make changes in the design of the new products that would : l Improve the performance of the product and also make possible the mechanization of some operations. l Eliminate some operations altogether. l Make it possible to alter the sequence of assembly without altering in any way the quality and marketability of the product. It was possible to devise a new manufacturing system in which certain sequences were performed completely automatically while others were performed by small groups with considerable scope for organizing their own work. The mechanized and group assembly areas could be separated from each other but linked into a smooth work flow by ingeniously designed devices for moving the product from work station to work station. The new line also could be designed economically to provide a good work environment. Unfortunately, although this alternative-a mixture of the fourth and sixth systems-scored high on quality of worklife, ease of operation, utilization of mechanical equipment, and low cost, it was marred by the existence of a few unmechanizable, shortcycle, machine-paced, low quality-of-worklife jobs. These jobs could have been eliminated at extra costs and by abandoning some of the labor-saving possibilities on the line. However, this was not the decision. Instead, it was assumed that more mechanized methods would eventually be discovered that would eliminate the remaining nasty jobs. Meanwhile, workers could be paid well to do these jobs. The compromise between the fourth and sixth alterna-
tives was judged to be the best possible solution to the problem of optimizing the quality of worklife and business elliciency. Out of the 150 workers contemplated under the new system, 90 percent would have alternative-four jobs. For all of them, the new jobs would be much richer than the old. Even so, the social scientists on the team did not agree that the final compromise constituted the best possible solution. The company’s engineers insisted that mechanization take precedence over quality-of-worklife considerations; hence the rump of machine-paced, short-cycle jobs. Another feasible version of the fourth alternative exists-and is fully costed-that foregoes a small measure of mechanization in favor of further improvements in the quality of worklife. It will be two years before the new system goes into operation. There is still a possibility, although fairly remote, that the fourth alternative system will be the ultimate choice.
CONCLUSIONS
The engineers on this project found that their engineering skills and ingenuity were severely tested by the necessity of finding technical solutions within the constraints posed by quality-of-worklife considerations, and they enjoyed being tested. The social scientists faced the challenge of helping to find systematic ways of introducing quality-of-worklife considerations into the process of manufacturing design and the unusual experience of seeing a process they had a part in designing first appear as blueprints and eventually as steel and concrete. The managers of the company who commissioned the study are now more aware that in most problems of organizational design, the design criteria are multiple and
competing. They have learned that the process of working out the trade-offs that have to be made is a complicated one, but that done logically and systematically, it need not consume inordinate time and cost. It was about six months from the initial analysis of the existing assembly operations to the acceptance of the final recommendation from the project team. In this article, we have sketched the outlines of a basic logic and method. Admittedly, the methodology as practiced contained a serious flaw. As devices for measuring the job expectations of employees, on-line observations by the project team and the opinions of the foremen and higher management were less than satisfactory substitutes for the direct testimony of the workers themselves. A less fearful management would have permitted the gathering of more valid evidence. We suspect that interviews with the workers would have resulted in a profile closer to those evolved by the project team and senior management than the profile developed from the foremen’s opinions. But we have no sure way of knowing. The application of a similar or improved methodology (improved by including employee interviews) for reconciling quality of worklife and considerations of efficiency may have resulted, under different circumstances, in a vastly different outcome. We should remember that the firm in this study faced a competitive bind: The world market for its product was declining while competitive pressures were intensifying. To survive, let alone prosper, the firm had to be very efficient. In other words, conditions in the external environment did not permit the firm to weight quality-of-worklife factors equally with considerations of efficiency. The efforts to improve the quality of worklife were more preventive than remedial:
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There was little evidence of employee dissatisfaction with jobs as they were; rather, it was largely a case of trying to anticipate future dissatisfactions and heading them off before they began to seriously impair efficiency. In designing its now famous assembly plant at Kalmar, Volvo, for example, went all out for the fourth alternative and in the process incurred substantial additional costs-at least 10 percent more than would have been involved in a traditional assembly-line operation. But Volvo was reacting to the challenge of a 40 percent annual turnover rate and, even less bearable, an absentee rate that typically ran from 20 to 25 percent. To rectify these conditions was the principal motive behind Volvo’s effort to improve the quality of worklife in its new as well as its existing plants. Problems with employees in our firm were less, and the remedies adopted, quite appropriately, were not as drastic. Whether the company would have believed that it could
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afford a more economically costly alternative if employee dissatisfactions had been greater is a moot question. Probably not. However, we can? be certain. We think the project has demonstrated the potential for a fruitful collaboration between engineers and social scientists in designing or redesigning a manufacturing system. Traditionally, the problem has been that both parties have taken a black-and-white approach to the problems involved. Furthermore, what was white to the engineers was black to the social scientists, and vice versa. Most engineers viewed the problem from Position A, most social scientists from Position C. Diametrically opposed positions afforded little hope for compromise or effective collaboration. This article has described the outlines of the contingency model, Position C, and the potentialities of the tools used in conjunction with it. At most, it should persuade some to engage in similar practical experiments. At
least, it should contribute to clarifying nature of the quality-of-worklife problem manufacturing.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
The earlier publications of mine, On the Shop (Pergamon Press, 1963) and “Organizational Change-Top Down or Bottom Up Management” (Personnel Review, October 1971), shed some light on the relationship between efficiency and the quality of worklife. The earlier book, based on observations in two workshops, mustered empirical evidence to test the theory that explains the relationship between technology, work-group power and control, and operation of reward systems. The article argued that change can be managed successfully only to the extent that it is preceded by a diagnosis that takes full account of the operator’s knowledge, perceptions, and concerns and incorporates these into the plans for change. The method used for determining what the employees’ expected from their worklives was adapted from Arthur Turner and Paul Lawrence’s Industrial jobs and the Worker (Harvard University, Division of Research, 1965). Fred Herzberg’s contention that the only real motivatars and satisfiers are the inherent characteristics of the job itself was set forth in The Motivation to Work (Wiley, 1959). For a critical comment, see my paper “ ‘Best Fit’ in the Design of Organizations” (Personnel Review, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1975). D. Gowler and K. Legge developed the idea of the gradual accommodation to and acceptance by workers of the conditions under which they work in “Occupational Role Development” (Personnel Review, June and November 1972). Last, there is the two-volume work, The Quality of Work Life, edited by Louis Davis and Albert Cherns, that soon will be published by The Free Press; it will include discussions of just about every facet of the problem by an assemblage of experts. Floor