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"High Performance Work Systems" - Is "High Performance" a realistic alternative to the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs? Can the adoption of new work practices improve the lives of manufacturing workers, supporting higher wages and better working conditions? A recent book by three economists and a sociologist, all associated with the Economic Policy Institute, tackles those questions. After weighing the evidence, the authors of Manufacturing Advantage conclude that high performance work systems can indeed boost company performance, securing good jobs in the process. Whether they can reverse manufacturing decline more broadly is another question. "High performance" defined The only workable response to this confusion, overuse, and outright misuse is to define the term carefully. The authors of Manufacturing Advantage offer both a broad definition, and a more focused one. At the broadest level, they define "high performance" as a way of organizing work so that front-line workers participate in decisions that have a real impact on their jobs and the wider organization. Their more focused definition – the one used in the actual research – translates this theory into specific workplace practices. The degree of autonomy that workers enjoy on the job is the researchers’ first touchstone of high performance: how much control do workers have over their job tasks and work methods? In the absence of information and resources, of course, autonomy is meaningless. For that reason, the researchers consider workers’ access to coworkers, managers, and supporting professionals (such as manufacturing engineers and product designers) their second high performance touchstone. The third touchstone is the existence of self-directed teams on the production floor; the fourth, off-line problem-solving and quality improvement teams. While many, if not most, manufacturing plants have adopted one or more individual practices associated with high performance, the authors don’t consider a high performance work system to be in place unless the plant has adopted a consistent set of practices drawing on all four of their high performance touchstones. The authors further theorize that the impact of high performance practices on quality and productivity is likely to be greater if these practices are supported by a company’s overall approach to human resource management. Supportive human resource practices, in their view, include extensive screening of new employees; increased training for front-line workers; a commitment to employment security; and financial incentives tied to group performance. Evidence from three industries By studying three such different industries, the researchers raise the likelihood that their findings are broadly generalizable across the manufacturing sector. Bottom lines: for companies, for workers What about workers? Here, the findings were mixed. The evidence gathered by the researchers did not turn up the industrial utopia envisioned by some high performance advocates. Opportunities to participate do seem to cause workers to view their jobs as more meaningful and challenging. However, this does not translate directly into increased job satisfaction. In two of the three industries, in fact, there was no connection whatsoever between worker participation and overall job satisfaction. (In the third, steel, the researchers found only a weak connection.) What’s more, some high performance practices were actually associated with decreased job satisfaction in some settings – a reminder that when it comes to workplace change, the context of the change matters. (According to the authors, self-directed work teams in the apparel industry are associated with reduced job satisfaction. They speculate that sewing machine operators, accustomed to working at their own pace, find the transition to teams particularly difficult.) On the other hand, the research did not find any evidence that high performance is masking a management-driven speed-up. Workers in more participatory work settings reported less mandatory overtime, were less likely to describe conditions in their plant as unsafe or unclean, and reported less conflict with coworkers. There was no relationship between high performance and excessive workloads. There was, however, a relationship with workers’ paychecks. Participation in work teams, as well as overall opportunity to participate, was positively associated with an individual worker’s earnings in the firms under study. That stands in contrast to work by other researchers, using different data and different analytical approaches, who have not found a relationship between high performance and higher wages. Unanswered questions Can high performance save manufacturing jobs that would otherwise be lost? While the authors are convinced that new work systems offer a better way of making things, they are also well aware of the broader forces arrayed against U.S. manufacturing workers. As they point out,
The pull of low wages is still powerful – more powerful, in many instances, than the promise of high performance. Without policies to discourage companies from taking the "low road," it’s not at all clear that high performance will become the face of U.S. manufacturing in the 21st century. Source: Eileen Appelbaum, Thomas Bailey, Peter Berg and Arne Kalleberg, Manufacturing Advantage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) |
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