The following case study highlights some of the problems that may arise when implementing teamworking.

StitchCo was a family-owned, single-brand company manufacturing garments for retail stores. Under a traditional Tayloristic management system, there was a clear division between the conception and execution of work: management planned the work while labour did it. Employees were paid under a piecework payment system (that is, each was paid according to the number of pieces of work that he or she made), which identified each person as the producer of the product. Each individual was responsible for maximizing his or her output and was rewarded accordingly.

A financial crisis in the company led to half of the company’s manufacturing facilities being closed. StitchCo management thought that teamwork could provide a cost-effective, continuously improving way of enhancing profitability of the company, helping it to respond more rapidly to shifting market demands, competitive pressure, and opportunities. Management saw teamwork as a way of improving flexibility and speeds in response to fluctuating demand. It was planned to replace line work with teamwork. The change was announced without prior warning and teamwork was introduced into parts of the manufacturing operations immediately, before being gradually phased into other sites over a few years. It led to a 30 per cent increase in productivity.

The new teamwork method put machinists into self-managing teams. Teams typically comprised six machinists with mixed skill levels. With the introduction of teamwork, the division of conception from execution became blurred, because employees were expected to assume a degree of self-managed responsibility for organizing the work process collaboratively. They were rewarded for modifying work practices in ways that improved profitability. The first targets that they were now expected to meet were delivery, performance, and quality; the fourth was output.

There were a number of elements inherent in the new working practices. Workers were paid a flat-rate payment, supplemented by a team-based bonus system. The flat rate depended on an individual’s skill band. He or she would be labelled high, medium, or low skilled; the higher the skills, the higher the pay. Any machinist who attained a minimum of 80 per cent efficiency in time and motion calculation tests based on the minutes required to perform a particular task was allocated to one of three bands—but skill bands could be lowered, as well as increased. The team-based bonus was designed to establish a clear link between performance and rewards. Teams were rewarded on the basis of quality and delivery, then on output and the cost/profit implications of their activities. The quality of teamwork was measured each week. The efficiency of teams was posted half-daily to motivate teams to outperform others.

The machinists in the high skill band had misgivings about the change, because they felt that they might lose by being in a team with less skilled machinists. A style change—that is, a change in the garment being produced by a team —meant lower levels of efficiency and reduction in pay. Such changes happened every three or four weeks. Management thought that it was in the interests of the higher-skilled workers to help the lower-skilled to improve their performance. Many machinists, however, were reluctant to manage themselves in the ways intended by management. Team members were not necessarily committed to improving or maximizing output, especially if that meant having to compensate for the poor performance of other team members. Machinists accused supervisors and managers of looking to the harder-working and more productive machinists to set the pace-but they were unrecognized and unpaid for this. Harder- working and more highly skilled machinists felt under pressure to get the team, as a whole, to earn an acceptable bonus.

For some, earning the bonus was comparatively unimportant. The flat-rate payment for ‘just turning up’ had been intended to signal a new ethos of trust, but allowed those who were least concerned about reaping the bonus to reap the benefit of others’ efforts. Those who did want to maximize bonus were not willing to accept the responsibility of resolving any tensions and conflicts within teams.

Questions

1. Why was there resistance to teamworking at StitchCo?
2. Ezzamel and Wilmott argue that teamworking can have the unintended effect of fomenting hostility towards management. How?
3. What could management have done differently?