participation and democracy

One of my brothers is a line supervisor for Ford, working at a plant that produces the Ford F150 (along with several other models). The plant is fairly new both in the line's design and in work design. He went through weeks of training to learn about the new system and new ways to manage the new approach to tasks. His job went from directly supervising about 40 people to directly supervising 3-4 team leaders. Now, although he still interacts with all 40 employees, much of the micro-level managing is left up to the team leaders--empowering more organization members. Along with this switch to team leaders came the idea of job rotation. No longer would someone working the line do the same task for 8-10 hours at a time day after day.

Initially morale was high as workers learned all the jobs in their unit and were able to rotate tasks. But recently, upper management decided that this system made it difficult to hold workers accountable because it wasn't clear who worked at a particular task at a particular time. However, those making the decision failed to ask supervisors (much less those working on the line) how to address this issue. My brother has all his employees keep track of when they're working at a specific station so each task can be linked to a specific person. Encouraging employee participation would have solved this problem in a way that wouldn't hurt morale and would keep productivity up.

In this case, involving employees (at least line supervisors) would have benefited the organization. But as jdmINT points out, participation can be viewed as a burden. Endless meetings, reading memos, doing research--all this in addition to the employee's job. SantaCruz also notes the positives and negatives of team-based organizations. Some tasks simply require a team--one person can't do it alone. Still, coordination can prove difficult and sometimes teams (and team leaders) can work at cross-purposes.

sp1028 blogged about the importance of diversity in teams. Including people on a team who have a variety of experiences and perspectives can be useful for complex problems and decisions. However, the potential for conflict is also greater. Yet if team members can keep focused on the larger objective, the richness of perspectives and bring about creative solutions to the problem.

Although workplace democracy seems ideal, it's not without dialectical tensions as organization members put democratic principles into action. Next week we'll talk about different approaches to democracy and how they might be implemented in organizations.

--Professor Cyborg