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This chapter examines the miners’ occupational culture of planisa at the level of supervisor–worker relations. The chapter presents a tale of two frontline production supervisors or shift-bosses as they were called on the mine – Jimmy and Lee. In this context, the ability of the production supervisor to make a plan in ways that enhance the social organisation of the production process and people management is crucial to the development of a reciprocal working relationship. The chapter argues that planisa also entails a valuable social organisational skill through which frontline supervisors could effectively use to manage work group dynamics and team performance associated with teamworking, intra-team conflict, effort-bargain and resistance.

The chapter reveals that by ‘getting on and getting by’ with his charges – going an extra mile to making plan for his mining teams wherever possible – Jimmy created a working environment that enabled his subordinates to achieve their production targets and increase their capacity to earn the much-desired productivity and safety bonuses. The case of Jimmy and his charges highlights the role of the frontline supervisor as a vital agent of workplace change that elicits worker cooperation and support for new work processes, not for the sake of pleasing management but in ways that benefit and make sense to them – going above and beyond organisational requirements to achieve the organisational performance goals at the point of production. On the contrary, the case of Lee, another frontline supervisor, demonstrates the opposite and highlights the harmfulness of poor supervisor–worker relations to the achievement of organisational, employee and team performance goals.

This chapter examines and discusses the unintended outcomes of the production bonus scheme the mine had instituted to motivate and increase the productivity of the frontline mining teams. This is crucial given that the maladministration of the bonus system could lead to a range of undesired outcomes such as deteriorating levels of trust between management and frontline workers, prioritisation of production at the expense of safety, poor work relations and ultimately low levels of organisational, employee and team performance. There are a number of organisational, management and labour factors that can render a production bonus scheme effective or ineffective. These factors influence the nature and extent of worker reactions to the bonus scheme.

This chapter examines and discusses the factors that influenced the reaction of the mining teams to the team-based production bonus scheme and the extent to which mine management fulfilled its side of the bargain in the implementation of the production bonus. The chapter highlights the manner in which the team-based bonus system influenced teams of stope workers to engage in their informal organisational practice of making plan (planisa) in order to offset the snags that jeopardised their prospects of earning the production bonus. The chapter reveals that, to a large extent, the productivity bonus generated conflict rather than cooperation at the point of production down the mine. As a result, the incentive scheme failed to live up to expectations by not eliciting the desired levels of organisational, worker and team performance at the rock-face.

This chapter discusses the miners’ informal working strategy of making a plan (planisa) in context of the relationship between teamwork training that was provided to the mining teams above the ground and its implementation in the underground mining workplace. The training programme was essentially about empowering and transforming frontline mining teams to self-directed work teams (SDWT) to understand the gold-mining business through the eyes of management. Its aim was to create new kinds of mineworkers who understood the what, how and why of the twenty-first-century mining business. AfricaGold sought to restructure the underground workplace through SDWT training in order to create a congenial, humane, democratic and more meaningful form of work processes, which permitted the mining teams to have greater flexibility in the production tasks they performed. The chapter reveals that the SDWT training seemed to have motivated the mining teams. Interestingly enough, this motivation tended to prevail even in situations of production bottlenecks. At the heart of this motivation was the miners’ organisational practice of making a plan. It is arguable that the SDWT training enhanced the desire of the mining work teams to make a plan in response to production blockages and managerial inefficiencies. This is essentially what the training aimed to do – to create new kinds of frontline mineworkers who are committed to achieving the productivity goals of a modern mining workplace. Ironically, the management of production did not seem to complement the inspiration and energy that the training instilled in the minds and hearts of the mining teams.

This paper enhances our understanding of how national culture impacts manufacturing performance (assembly speed, consistency between teams, etc.) during a production process move. The authors also investigate the efficacy of co-location as a strategy to enhance knowledge transfer from one organization to another.

To study the impact of national culture on production process moves, the authors develop and employ a team-based behavioral experiment within and between an individualist society (the United States) and a collectivist one (China). The authors also examine the impact of co-location on knowledge transfer effectiveness within and between these two unique cultures.

Interestingly, co-location has little impact on the performance of US recipient teams. Without co-location, Chinese recipient team performance lags significantly behind the US teams. However, firms can overcome these knowledge transfer challenges by co-locating source and recipient team members. These results suggest that firms should assess the national cultural context when considering co-location to manage their production move. There are contexts where co-location may be incredibly useful to facilitate an effective knowledge transfer (e.g. collectivist cultures like China) and contexts where this approach may not be as valuable (e.g. individualistic cultures such as the United States).

This research contributes to the academic literature in several ways. First, while past research demonstrates that national culture can be an essential barrier to information and knowledge sharing, this paper extends these findings showing that co-location may effectively overcome this barrier. After the authors offer and test the merits of co-location, they also establish the boundary conditions of this approach by showing that the effect of co-location on knowledge transfer is contingent on the cultural context. This contribution enhances our understanding of the relationship between national culture and knowledge sharing and has implications for managers developing approaches to transfer knowledge between cultures. Second, the authors develop and execute a novel cross-country experimental design. While cross-country experiments have been done before (e.g. Ozer et al. 2014, Kuwabara et al. 2007, etc.), it is still rare to see such experiments due to them being “technically difficult and costly” (Ozer et al. 2014, p. 2437). This research not only offer insights into how teams of people from individualist and collectivist societies send, receive and comprehend production knowledge. It also documents how these teams convert this knowledge into production results.

With the increasing technological innovation in the automotive industry, the need for complementary innovations in worker organization has arisen. In response to this need, two distinct approaches for teamwork in automotive production have been developed. This paper discusses both the Japanese and the Scandinavian teamwork models and their various implementations found among auto manufacturers worldwide. Work teams must be supported by changes in production philosophy, intensive training programs, and enhanced labor‐management relations. These complementary systems require significant investments, making team building a risky but potentially valuable venture. New insights on team building and its implications for production processes are provided.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate design features of variable pay plans adopted for shop-floor workers engaged in manufacturing firms that had implemented lean production systems, and the effects of design features on their job performance.

In total, 892 shop-floor workers attached to lean implemented manufacturing firms in Sri Lanka responded for the study. Structural equation modelling was used for the data analysis.

It was found that the performance evaluation-base for variable payments, variable pay calculation-base and goal setting for variable pay significantly predict job performance of the shop-floor workers.

It could be expected that the academics and practitioners alike are motivated by their desire to clearly apprehend the contribution of variable pay plans on job performance of the shop-floor workers engaged in lean production systems. This demands more investigations to better understand the design features of variable pay plans.

Using data from a large cross-section of British establishments, we ask how different firm characteristics are associated with the predicted benefits to organizational performance from using team production. To compute the predicted benefits from using team production, we estimate structural models for financial performance, labor productivity, and product quality, treating the firm's choices of whether or not to use teams and whether or not to grant teams autonomy as endogenous. One of the main results is that many firm characteristics are associated with larger predicted benefits from teams to labor productivity and product quality but smaller predicted benefits to financial performance. For example, this is true for union recognition as measured by the number of recognized unions in an establishment. Similarly, when a particular firm characteristic is associated with lower benefits from teams to labor productivity or product quality, the same characteristic is frequently associated with higher predicted benefits to financial performance. This is true for the degree of financial participation and employee ownership and also for establishment size and a number of industries. These results highlight the advantages of analyzing broader measures of organizational performance that are more inclusive of the wide spectrum of benefits and costs associated with teams than the labor productivity measures frequently studied in the teams literature.

The purpose of the study is to describe the characteristics of the team designs in a call centre in the United Kingdom (UK) and The Philippines (RP). As the design of teams is influenced mainly by sociotechnical system theory and lean production, these are used as landmarks in the comparison.

The primary sources of information were recorded interviews with team members and their supervisors and observation of team operations. Outgoing personnel were also interviewed. Actual day‐to‐day operation of the teams was observed over a period of three months.

The case studies exhibit the characteristics of diverse production models in service firms. The UK case study was approaching the STS model whereas the RP case study was approaching the LP model but veering more to the mass production model of service firms.

The mass production model is similar to the LP model in the following dimensions: type of coordination, workplace, leadership style, job enrichment, work pace, work method, grouping of tasks, degree of seclusion and cycle time. It differed from the LP model as there are dimensions which are non‐existent in the mass production model. These are interdependence, job enrichment, job enlargement and motivation.

Although the mass production team design is acceptable in the manufacturing sector, it is doubtful whether it will work effectively in the service sector. Practising managers of service entities have the responsibility of devising appropriate human resource programs to mitigate the negative effects of the mass production model. Similarly, in adopting the STS model, management has to ensure that the autonomy which is the selling feature of STS is not being abused at the expense of quality service.

The study presents the differences between the STS, LP and mass production team models of service firms with respect to four sociotechnical principles, i.e. minimal critical specification, boundaries, multifunctionality and human values. The practical dimensions of these differences are presented and discussed.

Organizational networks are generally considered major antecedents of mutual influence in adopting similar practices, typically via a structure of dense ties, or closure. We propose that under conditions of competitive interdependence, closure may be associated with links established to access resources and knowledge and become a possible source of differentiation rather than imitation. We test these and other antecedents of imitative behavior and performance in the Italian TV industry with 12 years of data on 501 productions. We find that network closure is associated with lower imitation, centrality, but not status, leads to imitation, and that imitation lowers performance.

This chapter examines the interaction between formal and informal organisation of work in a deep-level mining workplace. In response to organisational constraints, underground mining teams make a plan (planisa) to offset production bottlenecks which affected the daily running of the production process at the rock-face down the mine. They ‘get on and get by’ inside the pit to cope with organisational dysfunctions and management inefficiencies. The chapter highlights the limits of formalised work methods and the significance of the frontline miners’ informal work practice of making a plan (planisa) as an existing and alternative working practice that shapes their subjective orientation, agency and resilience to deep-level mining work processes and managerial initiatives. While the informal work practice of planisa has pros and cons, any managerial strategy designed to improve organisational productivity, safety and teamwork must recognise and systematically articulate the frontline miners’ work culture of planisa. This is especially important if we are to fully understand the limits of contemporary organisational strategies and workers’ orientations towards modernised work processes and managerial practices.