Search results

The purpose of the paper is to examine the extent of employee empowerment within Australian manufacturing business units using an adapted version of the Pardo del Val and Lloyd instrument. The paper also examines the influence of organizational (business unit size, training, and link to rewards) and cultural (innovation, team work, and outcome orientation) factors on the extent of adoption of employee empowerment.

Data was collected by survey questionnaire distributed to one business unit within 250 manufacturing organizations.

The results reveal a moderate level of employee empowerment in Australian organizations, with the cultural factor, teamwork, and the organizational factors, training and link to rewards, found to have a significant impact on the overall level of adoption of employee empowerment. In addition, specific cultural and organizational factors were found to be associated with four different dimensions of employee empowerment (collaboration, formalization, directness, and degree of influence), and the empowerment of employees at three different stages of the decision making process.

The Pardo del Val and Lloyd measure provides a means by which organizations can gain an improved insight into their current employee empowerment initiatives and assess the critical preconditions that are most effective in enhancing employee empowerment initiatives.

This study confirms the validity of a new measure of employee empowerment. Furthermore, the study provides the first empirical analysis of the association between organizational and cultural factors with the level of employee empowerment as assessed by this measure.

LAUNCHED at the Farnborough International Airshow last year by FT Technologies Ltd. the FT280 Synchro/Resolver Test Set incorporates in one versatile instrument an Angle Position Indicators, Simulator and Reference Oscillator and is designed for testing and evaluating a wide range of synchro and resolver‐based avionics equipment.

To examine a simple testing method of measuring the force to pull a fabric through a series of parallel pins to determine the fabric softness property.

A testing system was setup for fabric pulling force measurements and the testing parameters were experimentally determined. The specific pulling forces were compared with the fabric assurance by simple testing (FAST) parameters and subjective softness ranking. Their correlations were also statistically analyzed.

The fabric pulling force reflects the physical and surface properties of the fabrics measured by the FAST instrument and its ability to rank fabric softness appears to be close to the human hand response on fabric softness. The pulling force method can also distinguish the difference of fabrics knitted with different wool fiber contents.

Only 21 woven and three knitted fabrics were used for this investigation. More fabrics with different structures and finishes may be evaluated before the testing method can be put in practice.

The testing method could be used for objective assessment of fabric softness.

The testing method reported in this paper is a new concept in fabric softness measurement. It can provide objective specifications for fabric softness, thus should be valuable to fabric community.