Empowerment & Production Workers

Empowerment and production workers: a knowledge-based perspective N. Duru Ahanotu

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Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA Introduction In 1994 and 1995, Saturn aired an automobile commercial to demonstrate the company’s commitment to the empowerment of production workers. The advertisement depicted a production worker who, on recognizing an anomaly on the assembly line, stops the line and alerts the resident manufacturing engineers to the problem. The engineers quickly locate and repair what turns out to be a minor problem, and the production worker expresses pride in his contribution to the problem-solving effort. Even though he recognized an aberration, he lacked the knowledge to diagnose and/or fix it. In fact, the engineers in the advertisement make no attempt to share or transfer some of this knowledge: they simply display the malfunctioning part. Of course, a television advertisement is a snapshot image rather than a comprehensive study, but as a representation of empowerment for production workers, this scenario seems to be missing the substance of empowerment. What the previous example demonstrates is dependence under the guise of empowerment: there certainly exists a degree of participation in the problemsolving activity, but empowering knowledge, the knowledge that builds the capacity to handle value-added job enrichment and/or enlargement, is absent. While organizations have achieved some success in empowering today’s whitecollar and other professional workers, they have had less success with production workers. I argue that, too often, production workers remain captive to external sources of design knowledge: managers, engineers, and other manufacturing professionals. This design knowledge constructs production processes and controls the direction of innovation. Even efforts to bring continuous improvement to the factory floor relegates workers to improve quality and productivity under the given production paradigm, but it does not provide them with enough tools or opportunities to alter, much less challenge, that same paradigm. Ultimately, production workers will not feel empowerment until they are participants in the innovative processes of a manufacturing company. This participation goes beyond quality programs and continuous improvement efforts. This level of participation requires that production workers actively contribute to innovative manufacturing practices, gain freer access to design knowledge, and acquire more design knowledge (formal and theoretical) through operative, experimental, and absorptive (collaborative) activities. I

Empowerment in Organizations, Vol. 6 No. 7, 1998, pp. 177-186. © MCB University Press, 0968-4891

Empowerment in have elsewhere called these activities the tripartite of production tasks (TPT) (Ahanotu, 1998); they establish a bi-directional flow of knowledge between the Organizations factory floor and the design sources of knowledge. Otherwise, production 6,7 178

workers will remain dependents of the production system and not become active participants in a process of evolving manufacturing core competencies. The knowledge-based perspective on empowerment presented in this paper reveals the essential role that knowledge and innovation play in making empowerment a reality for production workers.

Origins of the need for empowerment: beyond the demonization of Taylor Before discussing how production workers can achieve empowerment and before justifying the need for it, one should ruminate on the origins of the need for this empowerment (also see Honold, 1997 for a comprehensive literature review). These origins expose some of the knowledge-based principles for reachieving empowerment for production workers. There was a time in industrial practice during which production workers were essentially already empowered. It is well-known that the craftsmen that preceded scientific management and mass production were masters of their domain; they created and controlled their workspaces (for example: Hayes et al., 1988; Hirschhorn, 1984; Romer, 1993; Taylor, 1911). The knowledge wielded by these experts was carefully cultivated and obtained mainly through the close supervision of apprenticeship programs and the slow, steady diffusion of proven practices. In general, the owners of production completely deferred to their craftspeople for the design and execution of production processes. This organizational design deeply disturbed Frederick Taylor, one of the prime figures in the rise of scientific management: he believed that the informal knowledge creation amongst craftspeople that created a variety of methods to execute similar tasks was intolerably inefficient and that only academically trained managers and engineers could study this knowledge, formalize it, and create optimized standards. While much has been written about Taylor and his influence on manufacturing practices, it is appropriate briefly to review here his impact on worker empowerment. I conduct such an examination less in the modern, information/knowledge-era spirit of vilification of his work and more towards an appreciation for the dual nature of his work. Taylor’s fundamental ideologies are stated quite clearly in his important work The Principles of Scientific Management: “In almost all of the mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient mental capacity” (Taylor, 1911, pp. 25-6). Taylor goes on to claim that even if production workers had the mental capacity, they could not take time away from production activities to develop the sciences of manufacturing, nor could they conduct such work on the factory floor (pp. 38,

104). The appropriation of manufacturing knowledge by management took a lot of the thinking out of the doing of production work. Awash in standardized learning and bereft of genuine opportunities to innovate, production workers quickly became “disempowered”: the locus of sanctioned knowledge development moved up the hierarchy and away from the factory floor. The belief in one optimal methodology for any task tends to stifle innovation: multiple ideas cannot be compared, contrasted, and tested. However, Taylor conceded that continuous improvement was essential and that production workers should be allowed to suggest new ideas to an appreciative management willing to investigate in good faith (p. 118). Taylor even refuted the claim that his philosophy of knowledge standardization destroyed worker independence by comparing his training methods to those for surgeons who get the benefit of best practices and who are free to create new ideas rather than re-invent old ones. Taylor placed heavy emphasis on the responsibility of firms to train and improve their workers (pp. 6, 12). Finally, he was a firm believer in collaboration among production workers, engineers, and managers as the path to success in manufacturing: “… the time is coming when all great things will be done by that type of cooperation in which each man performs the function for which he is best suited, each man preserves his own individuality and is supreme in his particular function, and each man at the same time loses none of his originality and proper personal initiative, and yet is controlled by and must work harmoniously with many other men” (p. 140). As is evident here, Taylor tried to establish a difficult dual concept of closely regulated innovation and controlled but expressive individual expertise. Thus, while Taylor’s obsession with efficiency and scientific practice disempowered production workers, a good amount of the spirit of his writing suggests that, had industrial establishments so chosen, they still could have maintained workplaces that valued the contribution of employees and their improvement. Despite his heavy hand, Taylor recognized two critical components of manufacturing. First, he recognized that manufacturing innovation had to both extend beyond direct application on the factory floor and be integrated with actual manufacturing practice. Limiting one’s knowledge field directly to production activities generates limited innovation. Deep technical understanding comes from study, experimentation and intimate collaboration with colleagues. Second, although he undervalued the intellectual potential of workers, Taylor appreciated the wealth of experiential knowledge resident amongst production workers. In fact, Juravich (1985) correctly claims that “… one of Taylor’s fundamental insights – the notion that workers’ knowledge is the place to begin any production reform – has been forgotten. On the other hand, those aspects of the Taylor system that stress management control on the shop floor have been most thoroughly accepted” (p. 90). Thus, selective interpretation of Taylor’s work led to the crisis in manufacturing that precipitated the modern-day pronouncements of the empowerment movement. Several writers have keenly demonstrated how even in this era of disempowerment that the working knowledge of production workers remained

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Empowerment in absolutely essential to maintaining functional plants (Darrah, 1996; Juravich, 1985; Kusterer, 1978). In today’s attempts to re-appreciate knowledge in the Organizations workplace, we now face the renewed peril that management may ultimately 6,7 180

seek to re-appropriate the knowledge that is particularly critical to their businesses. Organizational practitioners and researchers preach on methods to take advantage of tacit knowledge, diffuse knowledge more widely and faster through an organization, or catalogue intellectual capital. Most interestingly, many of the movements which have sought to streamline organizations and make them more efficient, such as re-engineering, just-in-time (JIT) production, statistical process control (SPC), best practices, and total quality management (TQM) are ironically reminiscent of Taylor’s systematic approach to eliminating waste. Juravich (1985) even suggests that the celebrated excellence of Japanese manufacturing practice is perhaps due more to the perfection and refinement of Taylor’s attention to detail and to the awareness of the importance of manufacturing than to any unique Japanese or Eastern ethos (p. 94). Klein (1989) recognizes that “… the attack on waste … inevitably means more and more strictures on a worker’s time and action”. Klein (1989) further reveals the drawbacks of some of these initiatives: the minimal buffers in JIT can eliminate the slack and idle time workers require to conduct non-production activities … thus substantially reducing opportunities to participate in processes of innovation. Under such systems, it is hard to imagine how calls for empowerment through self-organizing, organic structures can succeed. Even Taylor recognized how a day full of production tasks sets ceilings on innovative potential. Klein’s (1989) intriguing solution consists of scheduled “preventive maintenance” for workers in which non-production, knowledge-creating activities, such as collaborative gatherings and experimentation, can be scheduled just as machines are temporarily removed from production for maintenance requirements. This maintenance helps sustain long-term performance. What we witness then in empowerment for production workers is a conflict between the imperative to make products faster and better and the time and freedom to exercise the expanded tasks required to develop the knowledge needed to sustain empowerment. In earlier work, I developed a conceptual model for organizations to balance these goals through a set of production tasks (the TPT): production, experimentation, and absorption (Ahanotu, 1998). The learning during production is usually called learning-by-doing (LbD) – although Upton (1995) does claim that operations activity can also produce new design knowledge if workers are encouraged to actively seek to understand how and why a process works. Experimentation is an opportunity to test and reflect on new ideas apart from the immediate pressures of production. Absorption involves any collaborative activities, particularly between production workers and sources of specialized design knowledge. This same model is applicable and relevant to principles of empowerment. The underlying presumption is that without consistent and diligent attention to knowledge development that integrates production workers into processes of innovation, we cannot achieve

empowerment among production workers. We next investigate the characteristics of knowledge and innovation that make them so critical to empowering production workers. Knowledge and the empowered, innovative production worker It appears then that to talk of empowerment for production workers, practitioners and researchers have come full circle in an attempt to restore that which had previously existed. These modern efforts exist in a new knowledgeintensive and informated production paradigm driven by powerful computing technologies and sophisticated machinery. A direct emphasis on participative roles in processes of innovation has not occupied enough of these discussions. This participation proceeded unimpeded before mass production because new manufacturing practice came about through the collective, evolutionary activities of expert craftspeople. Now, the division of labor and complexity of production technologies has apparently made roles of participation harder to conceive. Barley (1996) is one of the few thinkers helping to clarify these roles using knowledge and learning as a central theme: “Consultants portray empowerment as a motivational device or a means of enhancing quality, rather than a response to the fact that technical expertise increasingly lies in the lower echelons”. Such a reality for manufacturing practice would certainly dismay Taylor as being quite regressive. Yet, the misplaced emphasis on motivation rather than knowledge development has certainly hindered the effective implementation of empowerment programs. To understand how and why the truly empowered production worker must participate more fully in processes of innovation, we must conceptualize production work around knowledge just as so much has been done to re-orient the work of white-collar and other professional workers around knowledge. Despite the neglect existing throughout the organizational learning and knowledge management literature, Romer (1993) is encouraging: after noting efforts at General Electric that have shown that “all of the good ideas come from hourly workers”, Romer (1993) notes that “… every worker in an organisation, from top to bottom, can become a ‘knowledge’ worker if given the opportunity to do so.” Cusimano (1995), Darrah (1996), Juravich (1985), Kusterer (1978), and Leonard-Barton (1995) all present convincing evidence of a centrality of learning and knowledge to production work that is very suggestive in its implications for manufacturing empowerment. First and foremost, knowledge is the potential to do work (Ahanotu, 1998). As such, an empowered production worker is one who can develop knowledge free of artificial restraint. If knowledge development is otherwise blocked, then the worker cannot express his/her fullest potential for work. The ultimate expression of this potential is through innovation. However, as intimated earlier, production workers have typically been constrained to learn within a given production regime. That is, it has been some other function’s privileged responsibility to innovate new production processes; once developed these ideas are passed forward where manufacturing can begin to continuously improve on

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Empowerment in the concept. This continuous improvement is largely learning-by-doing with little option for other knowledge development activities (see Nilsson, 1995). Organizations Some close exceptions have been the efforts of companies like IBM to 6,7 182

implement “early manufacturing involvement” in the development of new semiconductor manufacturing processes (Bradbee et al., 1989). Dertouzos et al. (1990) list several benefits of active knowledge development amongst production workers: workers can organize their own work better, less reliance on technical specialists for handling production contingencies, and increased capability of the entire production system. These are all characteristics of empowerment, and they rely on knowledge development. Wilson (1996) describes this environment as “inform-and-entrust”. Workers are given as much freedom as possible to communicate, share information and knowledge, and learn in an organization of self-managed teams. Even without official sanction empowered front-line workers tend to form communities-ofpractice that provide conduits of knowledge and innovation that give these workers intimate and socially, rather than organizationally, validated control over their work practices (Brown and Duguid, 1991). An empowered production system is able to contribute its own knowledge to the design function and even to internalize some design knowledge. Without this bi-directional flow, production knowledge becomes isolated and detached from larger organizational core competencies. Norros (1995) creates the term “expansive system development” to describe the collaborative activities among production workers and designers that can foster this type of knowledge flow. The expertise of operators is improved through theoretical understanding and awareness of the entire system and designers learn better about the realities of production. This mutual understanding and the resulting bi-directional flow of knowledge both relieves the constraints that each knowledge source presents on the other and expands the opportunities for innovation, especially for production workers. This process goes beyond “design for manufacture” (DFM) through which designers remain in control of knowledge generation, and production knowledge can be explicitly structured for codification (particularly in computer-aided-design software). Expansive system development requires the active participation and involvement of both knowledge sources. Yet, instead of expansive system design, inform-and-entrust, high-trust (Vickery and Wurzburg, 1996), sanctioned communities-of-practice, or the TPT, we find production worker empowerment programs that too often limit themselves to routine continuous improvement. Argyris (1998) identifies the general, hidden limitations of many empowerment programs by asserting that they only generate external commitment to improve performance in relatively routine and structured tasks. As an example from Sitkin et al. (1994), the emphasis on reducing error rates and doing things correctly the first time under TQM forces production workers into single-loop learning (Argyris, 1993), meaning that they focus on continuous improvement of current processes but not on developing new knowledge for alternative production or product possibilities. Despite Pasmore’s (1994) caution that there is a difference between

“constant improvement and perfection of the current system” (p. 82), most production workers experience these as one and the same. In fact, after studying several industrial companies, Neal and Tromley (1995) assert that “generally major technological changes are not a result of quality improvement process activities”, again suggesting that continuous improvement is only innovation of a limited scope. After all, innovations usually increase error rates before reducing them, working against the edicts of total quality programs. Thus, efficiency-based manufacturing practices such as TQM can indeed have the effect of limiting empowerment rather than encouraging it (see Klein, 1989). Sitkin et al. (1994) introduce total quality learning (TQL) as one solution. TQL is implemented in the nascent, uncertain stages of a production system where tuning of learning processes instead of TQM’s tools of cybernetic control is paramount. After a certain body of knowledge has been gained, TQM becomes more applicable. Wilson (1996) proffers knowledge management as an improvement upon TQM. I have presented the TPT as a conceptual framework for resolving dilemmas of knowledge development for production workers (Ahanotu, 1998). The primary point is that knowledge-based manufacturing practices are key for taking the next step in freeing up the factory floor to exercise its highest of potential. They are key to supporting the empowered, innovative production worker. Examples from industry While my own empirical research in this area, using the semiconductor industry and other smaller industries, is still on-going, there are a few examples from the literature which show promise. I present here one example from the literature and another example from one exploratory case study (together with some supporting literature). The New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) plant in Fremont, California (USA) is an example of a company that gives its workers time to exercise the non-production activities conducive to empowerment. When work is low, rather than automatically reducing the workforce, NUMMI sends workers into knowledge-creating activities, kaizen teams, to work on specific improvement projects or to training classes (Adler, 1993). Although this process does not guarantee innovative thinking beyond existing production systems, it is a suggestive example of an opportunistic technique that utilizes spare or slack resources. Even more germane to the framework I am proposing is the job-enlargement that brings NUMMI production workers closer to industrial engineers. Production workers devise their own work by learning work analysis, description, and improvement. Interestingly, they also use the organizational hierarchy as a supporting structure for their efforts and standardization to diffuse the lessons learned from effective work practices (Adler, 1993). The use of the hierarchy can be beneficial if each level adds value to the level below (Espejo et al., 1996). As an example of the expertise and knowledge developed, employees made over 10,000 suggestions in 1991 with over 80 per cent of those being implemented (Adler, 1993).

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Empowerment in Sun Hydraulics of Sarasota, Florida (USA) essentially allows its approximately 280 employees (at the Sarasota valve-making plant that I visited) Organizations to choose their individual levels of empowerment. Because workers can plan out 6,7 184

their own work and can freely collaborate with engineering staff, a sizable number of employees (about 20-25 per cent, according to various informants) actively drive innovation on the factory floor. One particularly exceptional employee with whom I spoke implemented a novel manufacturing process to make a product that had previously presented the company with a host of production problems. The significance of Sun’s empowerment concept is substantial, considering that both production and innovation occur without official job titles, with salaries that match the average industry rate, and without special recognition given for innovations or improvements (also see Henderson, 1997; Kaftan and Barnes, 1991). Both Salancik and Pfeffer (1978) and Argyris (1998) help us understand such a system by challenging the efficacy of external rewards in fostering effective work practices. Specifically, Argyris (1998) suggests that most reward systems only reinforce external commitments, as opposed to intrinsic and lasting commitments, by creating “dependency” on these rewards to gain satisfaction from work. These scenarios again suggest that empowerment should be knowledge-based. Ultimately, effective empowerment co-exists with opportunities to freely exercise working knowledge and to participate in processes of innovation. Summary and conclusions Vickery and Wurzburg (1996) identify increased productivity, shorter production cycles, and improved quality as benefits of highly trained (for my purposes, knowledgeable) production workers, but they admit that the causality of these improvements is not readily evident. Indeed, in general, Roth and Miller (1992) claim that we have a poor understanding of how manufacturing strategies create competitive capabilities and profit. This of course makes implementation of production worker empowerment all the more difficult: the benefits of empowerment are usually long-term and only gradually become evident. Rather than appeal directly to efficiency and other economic principles, this paper presents a knowledge-based perspective as an alternative approach to understanding both the need for and the impact of empowerment on the factory floor. From this perspective, we can understand that empowerment cannot exist without knowledgeable workers and that empowerment is not complete until participation in processes of innovation occurs. Taylor (1911) recognized the wealth of knowledge of production workers and concluded that to empower management and engineers, organizations had to appropriate this knowledge from production workers. Taylor understood the centrality of knowledge. Where this principle was applied, it of course had the effect of disempowering workers. Ultimately, a combination of design’s necessarily incomplete knowledge of the realities of production, production worker’s inability to participate in processes of innovation and fundamental change, and the

inevitable resulting decline in manufacturing performance in the face of a major re-alignment in global production potentials and capabilities, necessitated today’s empowerment movement. This paper demonstrates that empowerment for production workers comes hand-in-hand with closer, long-term linkages to design sources of knowledge and a loosening of the ties to short-term efficiency-based logic. There exists no single organizational structure or optimal industrial model that best accomplishes this goal, but each level of the organization must contribute knowledge-based value to the overall manufacturing mission. Now that manufacturing practice has begun to return to full utilization of working knowledge and innovation, it is hoped that sustained emphasis on knowledge-based practices will establish wellgrounded empowerment on the factory floor. I also hope to encourage continued research into knowledge-based principles for furthering the goals and methodologies of empowerment in manufacturing organizations. References Adler, P.S. (1993), “Time-and-motion regained”, in Howard, R. and Haas, R.D. (Eds), The Learning Imperative: Managing People for Continuous Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA. Ahanotu, N.D. (1998), “A conceptual framework for modeling the conflict between product creation and knowledge development amongst production workers”, Journal of Systemic Knowledge Management, Vol. 1 No. 1, e-journal at http://www.free-press.com/journals/ knowledge/issue1/article9.htm Argyris, C. (1993), On Organizational Learning, Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA. Argyris, C. (1998), “Empowerment: the emperor’s new clothes”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 76 No. 3, pp. 98-105. Barley, S.R. (1996) “Technicians in the workplace: ethnographic evidence for bringing work into organization studies”, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 41, pp. 404-41. Bradbee, G.R., Gates, K.B. and Wilcox, R.B. Jr (1989), “Early manufacturing involvement in new process technology”, IEEE/Semi International Semiconductor Manufacturing Science Symposium, Burlingame, CA, pp. 12-16. Brown, J.S. and Duguid, P. (1991), “Organizational learning and communities-of-practice: toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation”, Organization Science, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 40-57. Cusimano, J.M. (1995), “Turning blue-collar workers into knowledge workers”, Training & Development, Vol. 49 No. 8, pp. 47-9. Darrah, C.N. (1996), Learning and Work: An Exploration in Industrial Ethnography, Garland Publishing, New York, NY. Dertouzos, M.L., Lester, R.K. and Solow, R.M. (1990), Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA. Espejo, R., Schuhmann, W., Schwaninger, M. and Bilello, U. (1996), Organizational Transformation and Learning: A Cybernetic Approach to Management, John Wiley, New York, NY. Hayes, R.H., Wheelwright, S.C. and Clark, K.B. (1988), Dynamic Manufacturing: Creating the Learning Organization, Free Press, New York, NY and Collier Macmillan, London. Henderson, A. (1997), “Corporate freedom: Sun Hydraulics of Sarasota prides itself on a unique management culture that encourages employees to be creative by leaving them alone”, Florida Trend, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 54-6.

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