آیا طراحی شغل تولید ناب می تواند ذاتا باعث انگیزه شود؟مسائل متنی، قابلیت پیکربندی، سطح تجزیه و تحلیل

Are lean production jobs intrinsically motivating? More than 20 years after the arrival of lean production, this question remains unresolved. Generally accepted models of job design such as the Job Characteristics Model (JCM, (Hackman, J.R., Oldham, G.R. 1976. Motivation through the design of work: test of a theory. Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, 250–279.)) cannot explain the occurrence of worker intrinsic motivation in the context of lean production. In this paper, we extend the JCM to the lean production context to explain the theoretical relationship between job characteristics and motivational outcomes in lean production. We suggest that a configuration of lean production practices is more important for worker intrinsic motivation than are independent main effects, and that motivation may be limited by excessive leanness. We conclude that lean production job design may engender worker intrinsic motivation; however, there are likely to be substantial differences in intrinsic motivation under differing lean production configurations.

Are jobs in lean production settings intrinsically motivating? More than 20 years after the arrival of lean production in the Western world, this question remains unresolved. It is also highly controversial. The extant literature concerning job design and motivation in lean production is fragmented, with conflicting claims emanating from operations management researchers, sociologists, and psychologists. On one hand, lean production proponents suggest that workers in lean production settings appear to display what could be characterized as intrinsically motivated behavior, appearing to be internally driven and more productive than in traditional assembly line settings. This behavior has been linked to improved manufacturing outcomes and competitiveness (Adler, 1993a, Hayes et al., 1988, Hopp and Spearman, 1996, Monden, 1983, Schonberger, 1982, Suzaki, 1987 and Womack et al., 1990). On the other hand, opponents of lean production argue that it places workers in highly limiting and alienating conditions; “motivation” in the best case is external, with workers simply complying with, and often resisting, restrictive practices that create dependent and deskilled workers (e.g., Babson, 1993, Berggren, 1992, Fucini and Fucini, 1990, Graham, 1995, Kamata, 1982, Milkman, 1997, Post and Slaughter, 2000 and Rinehart et al., 1997). With few exceptions (e.g., Brown and Mitchell, 1991 and Jackson and Mullarkey, 2000), evidence from both sides is largely anecdotal, and any conclusions that can be drawn are speculative. Two decades of discussion have yielded little progress. We attribute this impasse to the lack of theoretical job-design models suitable for explaining intrinsic motivation in the context of lean production. Three key areas need to be addressed if theory and empirical work are to advance in this area of motivation: (a) the role of contextual factors, (b) the configural or synergistic effects of work practices, and (c) levels of analysis (i.e., individual and organizational levels) implications at which effects are evident and their cross-level consequences. We briefly introduce the three areas below. First, to explain possible antecedents of intrinsic worker motivation in lean production settings, it is necessary to root job design models in the context in which motivation occurs (Parker et al., 2001). General job design intrinsic motivation models traditionally have been context-free, assuming that intrinsic motivation can be predicted in any type of context (Blair and Hunt, 1986 and Parker et al., 2001). The lean production context, however, demonstrates the limits of context-free models. For example, the Job Characteristics Model (JCM, Hackman and Oldham, 1975, Hackman and Oldham, 1976 and Hackman and Oldham, 1980) – which we will use as a platform for developing a more complete model of work motivation – specifies that autonomy, defined as freedom concerning work procedures and timing,1 is a sine qua non for the emergence of intrinsically motivating jobs. Lean production, though, is characterized by process standardization, with interdependencies resulting from lean production's focus on flow, teamwork, and short cycle times. Standardized processes reduce worker autonomy almost completely. According to the JCM, lean production jobs simply cannot be intrinsically motivating. As we will argue in this paper, however, intrinsic motivation is theoretically possible in lean production settings, but the type of explicative model must be concordant with the contextual forces that act on the phenomenon observed, including the choice of job characteristics, outcomes, and moderators. Second, many motivational models focus on the effects of individual practices on workers, ignoring the synergistic effect of various independent practices operating simultaneously. On the shop floor, however, workers do not perceive single practices independent of other practices; workers perceive joint effects, a whole that is not merely an addition of the component parts. For example, workers perceiving reduced levels of autonomy might still be motivated if that perception is accompanied by other job-design factors that compensate for, justify, and overcome this apparent lack of internal motivation. Thus, the impact of a configuration of practices on workers may be substantially different from the impact of the bivariate effects of these practices—the gestalt (whole) effect may account for more variance in the dependent measures than the summed (individual) effects of the parts (as demonstrated by Stajkovic and Luthans, 2003). Third, current motivational theories are limited by a lack of multilevel theorizing and testing. Organizational practices are implemented at the organizational level of analysis, but the effects of these practices are hypothesized to impact workers (i.e., at the individual level). Furthermore, individual-level outcomes (e.g., worker performance) are assumed to have impacts at the organizational level of analysis (e.g., organizational performance). These cross-level effects are implicit in most motivation models; however, with very few exceptions, the theoretical and empirical consequences of these cross-level processes have been ignored in the motivation and job design fields over the last several decades (Klein et al., 1994, Pierce and Dunham, 1976, Roberts and Glick, 1981 and Seibert et al., 2004). We believe that questions concerning lean production job design and intrinsic motivation are timely and important to answer. There is a clear need to better understand the kinds of motivational effects that lean production practices bring about. Efforts to create alternatives to lean production, while appealing, have not been successful at convincing large numbers of firms to replace their lean production practices (Adler and Cole, 1993 and Dankbaar, 1997). Lean production practices clearly are associated with better organizational performance (e.g., Flynn et al., 1995, Fujimoto, 1999, McKone et al., 2001, Porter, 1996, Shah and Ward, 2003, White et al., 1999 and Wood et al., 2004), and lean production is here to stay. Even lean production critics Rinehart, Huxley, and Robertson (1997: 2) acknowledge “If there is one non-debatable proposition in the early literature, it surely must be the claim that lean production will be the standard manufacturing mode of the 21st century.” Thus, our major purpose is to develop a theoretical job-design model that will allow researchers to grapple more effectively with the intrinsic motivational impacts of lean production job design. The JCM is the most widely accepted work design theory of worker motivation (e.g., Parker et al., 2001 and Spector, 2003). In the form proposed by Hackman and Oldham, 1975, Hackman and Oldham, 1976 and Hackman and Oldham, 1980, however, the JCM is not compatible with the lean production context. Much of the theory underlying the JCM, however, is useful for coming to terms with this conundrum. We propose an extended JCM that we suggest will better explain intrinsic motivation in the lean production context. Furthermore, the incompatibility between JCM theory and lean production practice is sufficiently surprising to warrant revisiting the JCM's proposed constructs and causal relationships (Whetten, 1989). In the remainder of the paper, we first introduce lean production as a manufacturing system (see Section 2). Next, we review the JCM in Section 3, then extend it to the lean production context (Section 4). We offer a summary and conclusions in Section 5.

Is lean production job design theoretically able to cause intrinsic motivation, such that workers increase their effort because of the task itself, or does the worker behavior observed under lean production result only from increased management control? Must managers hoping for worker commitment avoid lean production because of its standardization and interdependence, or are there paths to intrinsic work motivation within the lean production context? More than 25 years after the arrival of lean production, these questions have remained unanswered. The philosophy behind the JCM is a reasonable starting point for such an investigation, given the assumption that much of the impact of lean production implementation on motivation occurs through changes in job design. Extending the JCM to the lean production context, we have been able to link the factory physics of lean production to job characteristics perceived by lean production workers. The lean production context suggests division of autonomy into choice and responsible autonomy, eliminating a primary conflict between the JCM and lean production theory. Given the emphasis in lean production theory on training and equipping workers, we added the job characteristic of work facilitation. As lean production factory physics do not change the significance of the task, we eliminated the job characteristic of task significance from our extended model. The JCM was developed to provide a theoretical structure to explore the relationship between job enrichment and intrinsic motivation, which was then expected to result in various work-related outcomes. Our objective in the lean production context has been different: Job design arising from lean production's factory physics results in work performance, apparently mediated by intrinsic motivation in some cases. Given the tenuous link between the JCM critical psychological states and performance, we added experienced self-efficacy as a fourth critical psychological state both because it is a dimension of intrinsic motivation arising from job design and because it is positively related to performance. We proposed that the lean production job characteristics operate configurally to cause worker intrinsic motivation. The lean production literature suggested three natural configurations: (a) feedback and task identity (occurring in all lean production implementations); (b) feedback, task identity, skill variety, and work facilitation; (c) feedback, task identity, skill variety, work facilitation, and responsible autonomy. The job characteristic of choice is low in all lean production implementations. The lean production configuration emerging is moderated by excessive leanness, with skill variety, work facilitation, and responsible autonomy unlikely to be present in conditions where leanness is excessive. The addition of responsible autonomy, in particular, substantially increases the intrinsic motivation emerging from a lean production implementation. The different configurations explain some of the variance between the idealistic worker outcomes observed by authors such as Adler (1993a) and the bleak despair described by Kamata (1982). Lean production represents a group-level intervention that is proposed to impact individual workers homogenously. This cross-level effect needs to be tested, and may be more likely to hold in strong situations where management invests in molding worker perceptions of lean production, and where social identity is strong. In some lean production implementations, weaker situational strength may result in worker reactions that are idiosyncratic rather than homogenous. In such cases, group-level intervention will not result in intrinsic motivation. Thus, the roles of leaders might become more salient by framing events and motivating workers on an individual level in a customized way (Antonakis et al., 2004). It has not been our intention to argue that lean production turns assembly line work into a great job. Our goal is more pragmatic. After decades of job enrichment, assembly line work remains common, especially in competitive markets, and assembly line work is the only option available for many workers. Lean production appears to have made such work more tolerable – even motivating – for many assembly line workers (Adler, 1993a and Adler, 1993b). Under what circumstances would this be true? If choice autonomy is not an option, what are the alternatives? More counterintuitively, could authors like Adler (e.g., 1996) and MacDuffie (1995a) be correct in suggesting that workers actually are able to embrace lack of choice and still be intrinsically motivated? The extensions to the JCM required to cover the lean production context have implications for work motivation theory development in the field of operations management in general (both manufacturing and services). The long-held (and probably untenable) assumption concerning the criticality of choice autonomy to work motivation has resulted in neglect of factors such as work facilitation and self-efficacy belief. Just as leadership research is currently exploring how instrumental leadership (i.e., engendering follower work facilitation) can result in performance outcomes that are competitive with transformational leadership (based on leader charisma, Antonakis and House, 2004), restoring work facilitation to its right place might usher in a new era of work motivation theory in operations management. The motivational effects of “ideal” and “too” lean implementations are, theoretically, different. Recognizing the two-edged nature of leanness can help to avoid the motivational – and ethical – pitfalls inherent in the search for greater efficiency. We hope with this model to have made a first step toward their resolution.