In the Making Hotplates case study, the workers initially had extremely specialized jobs. With each task balanced at about 3 minutes per station, the work would have been extremely monotonous and dull. Under those circumstances, the workers would have hade poor morale and low motivation.
The primary chanve in the work situation was the enlargement of the job, which gives the worker a greater percentage of the total task. Instead of working on one subassembly for many hotplates, the workers now complete an entire hotplate before moving on. This allows the worker to be responsible for a greater portion of the task. Because the workers feel more motivated, the overall productivty and productivity has increased. Motivation is the force that drives the workers forward. With little motivation to work on the individual subassemblies, the workers got careless and slow. However, once the workers felt motivated by having ownership of an entire hotplate (“Now it is my hotplate”), they were able to control the defects and produce more products.
The drop in absenteeism and increase in morale were due to the increased satisfaction of the workers with their jobs. Satisfaction refers to a sense of a job that is worth doing, or happiness with the job. Job dissatisfaction is one result of overspecialization in job design, because the workers are unable to feel any sense of ownership of their work or control over their jobs. They are not able to feel self-fulfilled, and they have no opportunity to advance in their jobs. The work is tedious and monotonous. These factors together would have created unhappiness and a tendency for workers to miss work at the slightest provokation.
The primary change was the enlargement, and also the enrichment of the job by adding responsibilities for inspection of the final work. The manager changed the job by reorganizing the work line to create a greater range of movement and a wider set of tasks for each worker. The manager also added a training program, and left it up to the workers to decide whether they wanted to keep the new program or go back to the old method. The increased training and decision-making ability would have been very motivating and empowering for the workers. However, only the workers themselves were able to increase quality and productivity. The managers really can’t change whether or not the operators make errors that lead to defects. They could possibly punish or even fire the workers, but since it is the system that leads to the errors, not the individuals, that wouldn’t really make a difference. By setting up a more effective job design, the managers have made it possible for the workers to be productive and efficient, while maintaining product quality and improving morale and satisfaction.
If the old method was reinstated, the same problems would instantly arise. The workers would go back to being unmotivated and dissatisfied. In fact, things might even get worse, as they would have seen a better way to approach the work. In the past, management hadn’t had a problem with workers deliberately subverting or sabotaging the workflow, but it would be possible that they might start doing so under those circumstances. The workers would no longer feel responsible for quality of individual hotplates, as they do now, and the gains that have been made would be instantly lost.