No U.S. company is working harder than Texas Instruments, Inc., to foster innovation and to boost productivity, a crucial factor in an era of seemingly endemic inflation. And they’re pretty successful at it. Some observers point to TI as the prototype of what a U.S. company must be to compete in the surging, worldwide electronics market of the 1980s. Others suggest that only TI—of the major U.S. consumer electronics corporations— can compete effectively with the Japanese. How successful is TI? Continue reading »
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Productivity is today’s latest and greatest “we-view-with-alarm” editorial topic. Reading the acres of recent editorial comments, expert testimony, congressional statements, and man-on-the-street opinions leads us to a pair of disquieting conclusions. First, no one really knows what productivity is, at least not in any technical, measurable sense. Second, regardless of what it is, everyone with a cause to champion or a course of action to sell believes that he or she knows the cure for the American economy’s abysmal productivity growth. Continue reading »
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Performance Management (PM) is the 3M Company’s name for its highly successful program of positive reinforcement to achieve specific, measurable gains in job performance. At 3M Company in Canada alone, it produced savings “in excess of $2.56 million” from January to September 1978. Furthermore, says Henry J. Marsh, personnel develop¬ment coordinator of 3M Canada, “I wouldn’t be surprised if we had a total of $4.3 million by the end of the year, including savings of $1.835 million in 1977.
Marsh began the program in 1976, a year after it was introduced by the 3M parent company in St. Paul, MN. (See “How Behavior Modification Improves Productivity at 3M,” TRAINING, October 1976.) Performance Management was developed by 3M’s Education and Training Department to help first-line supervisors increase their effective¬ness through measured results, in¬creased productivity, employee satis¬faction and personal growth. Continue reading »
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Just as eating is the only reason for cooking and providing transportation the only reason for making cars, so job performance change is the only reason for train¬ing. However, the training field is not characterized by high degrees of accountability or concern for job per-formance change. Managers demand sales, not selling activity and pro¬duction, not plant operation. Why then, do they generally demand training rather than job performance change?
Job performance change is not to be confused with behavior change. Striking the keys is the typist’s be¬havior; the memo produced is an as¬pect of job performance. Any time a trainee passes a test or masters a skill, his behavior undergoes a change, but the job performance may or may not change as a result. Continue reading »
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A lot has been written and claimed about the relationship among job performance, job satisfaction and pay. One theory suggests that contented workers, like contented cows, produce more of whatever they are supposed to produce than do discontented workers. Pay, on the other hand, has been an enigmatic part of the formula. Motivation Theorist Hertzberg claims that pay has a limited effect as a satisfier. Other researchers like Cherrington and Luthans claim money has more of an impact. At the extreme is CEO/author Richard Sloma, who says that there are only three keys to motivation and satisfaction— money, money and more money. Continue reading »
For too long and in too many quarters, organization development has been considered an extension of the psychological sideshows reported so dramatically in the popular press. The encounter movement permits people— or their employers—to pay for the privilege of enduring abusive indictments of their social and sexual selves. These days learning for adults seems to require getting “grounded” as the guru-for-the-day intones sonorously, “Now relax, and let your buttocks really feel the floor.”
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This mentality has distorted OD the way it tainted another valuable—and valid—educational technique. Is any¬one buying T-groups this year? Of course not. Because T-groups in the late sixties and the seventies weren’t the same educational medium spawned by Kurt Lewin and developed by Lee Bradford and a group of educators in the late forties. Continue reading »