Page 122 - Psychological Management of Individual Performance

102 organizational design and organizational development
responsibility,longcycletimes,limiteddeliveryreliability,andqualitativeunder-challenging
of various groups of employees.

TABLE 5.1 Important human-oriented and enterprise-oriented goals of the project
Human-oriented goals Enterprise-oriented goals
Increase in responsibility Improvement in customer orientation
Job enrichment Higher accuracy of delivery time
Training and employee development Reduction of total cycle time
Improvement in collaboration Increase in competitiveness
Continued employment Increase in transparency

The change process
The most important steps and milestones of the project are shown in Table 5.2. In summary,
the most important milestones of this project were: (1) the preparation of the management;
(2) the analysis and evaluation of the status-quo; (3) the conceptual work in the areas
of organization and leadership, salary-system and lay-out design; (4) the qualification of
the group speakers and the employees; (5) the implementation based on pilot projects and
starting workshops; and (6) the evaluation of the new working and organizational structures.
The whole process from the beginning to the complete implementation took two years. Part
of the reason lies in the participative character of the change process, which involved
employees from different hierarchical levels and departments.
This procedure led to a fundamental redesign of the whole company, with completely
newly defined work systems. Service, as well as research and engineering, standardization,
and quality management, were defined as strategically important new work systems. The
departments of disposition, work preparation and purchasing were abolished and transferred
to an integrated department of material planning (see Figure 5.5).
The newly defined work systems are far-reaching, in line with the criteria outlined in
Figure 5.2. One hierarchical level was eliminated and the work groups are now organized
according to the principle of self-directed groups. Therefore, among other things, they
choose their group speaker autonomously. The layout was also changed extensively. The
work groups were spatially integrated and the work group material planning was spatially
transferred into the production.
The implementation workshops were of great importance within the operational change
process, and all employees of the various work systems participated in these workshops.
The most important topics of the workshops were:

common specification of the tasks and work processes, respectively of the inputs, the

transformation processes, and the outputs of the work system
agreements concerning internal work organization

determination of the actual and target figures of polyvalence

development of a training scheme for mutual training on the job

agreements concerning internal leadership, coordination, and common secondary tasks

agreements upon rules of collaboration and team work

improving openness to questions of social competence within work groups

agreements upon crucial features of performance of the work system.

Evaluation of the change process
A first evaluation of the new work, organizational, and management structures was carried
out by document analysis, individual interviews, group interviews, and written survey and
contained objective and subjective data material.