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Communicating for Organizational Change |
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Baar and Makabe's article details an organizational change initiative gone awry. It is the story of an Ontario, Canada consumer electronics plant, established by an American company and sold to a Japanese competitor during a recession. The new Japanese owners retained the old workforce and supervisory staff, and reopened the plant with only minor upgrades to the technical systems. The major change brought in was an entirely new set of managerial assumptions.
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Unfortunately, the new owners failed to communicate their new assumptions to the workforce. Incumbent supervisors continued to pressure workers for greater effort, more volume and less scrap - all elements of a strategy geared to maximize return on investment. But the new owners sought to maximize market share, not ROI. They understood that productivity depends on the smoothness of the production process, not solely on worker effort. They wanted their production workers and supervisors to work together to continuously improve the production process to provide greater flexibility, not higher volume.
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The aim of the new management was to produce a wider array of products to open-up and fill new market niches. But the pressures from the supervisors undermined this goal. They had not understood this new set of managerial assumptions. Their continuing fixation on error control and conformity to specifications hampered the retraining and multiskilling initiatives needed to develop a flexible, multi-skilled and re-deployable workforce, and the continuous improvement of production processes sought by the new owners.
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This demonstrates that it is not enough for employees only to understand what is expected of them, but not why. Indeed, it is essential that they understand why these expectations exist; particularly if they have changed from the old way of doing things. Only then can thinking people truly apply themselves to their tasks and live up to their responsibilities.
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Baar, Ellen., Makabe, Tomoko. Bureaucratic and Flexible Structures: The Transition from American to Japanese Management. Paper presented to the 1988 annual meeting of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association, Windsor, Ontario.
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