Managements have tended to reject ideas for the self-governing plant
community and for the responsible worker as an “encroachment”
on their prerogatives.
Of all my work on management and “the anatomy of industrial order,” I consider my ideas for the self-governing plant community and for the responsible worker to be the most important and most original. A self-governing plant community is the assumption of managerial responsibility by the individual employee, the work team, and the employee group alike for the structure of the individual job, for the performance of major tasks, and for the management of such community affairs as shift schedules, vacation schedules, overtime assignments, industrial safety, and, above all, employee benefits.
But managements have tended to reject these ideas as an “encroachment” on their prerogatives. And labor unions have been outright hostile: they are convinced that they need a visible and identifiable “boss,” who can be fought as “the enemy.” Yet what was achieved in these areas in World War II went way beyond anything that is being trumpeted today as a breakthrough, such as the highly publicized attempt to replace the assembly line at some Swedish automobile companies. This actually goes much less far than the assembly lines that have been standard in American industry, not to mention the responsibility factory-floor work teams have assumed routinely at IBM, hardly a particularly “permissive” company.
ACTION POINT: Delegate responsibility to all employees once you are assured they have been trained to assume this responsibility.
職場コミュニティと責任ある従業員という私の考えは
マネジメントの権限をおかすものとして拒否された。
マネジメントと産業秩序についての私の仕事のなかでは、職場コミュニティと責任ある従業員とういう考えが最も独特であり、かつ最も重要であったと思う。職場コミュニティとは、働く者本人たちに、仕事の設計、組織、シフト、休暇、残業、安全、福利厚生など現場の問題について責任をもたせるという考えだった。
しかし、そのような私の考えは、マネジメントの権限をおかすものとしてＧＭの経営陣から拒否された。労働組合からも反対された。彼らには敵としてのボスが必要だった。
だが実際の現場では、第二次世界大戦直後の当時、すでに事態ははるかに進んでいた。
ACTION POINT
従業員に責任をもたせられるだけの教育訓練を行ない、
実際に責任をもたせてください。