Strategies for Learning – Small–Group Activities in American, Japanese & Swedish Industry (Paper) - Softcover

Cole, R E

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520073983 ISBN 13: 9780520073982

Publisher: University of California Press, 1992

Synopsis

How do firms become motivated to adopt small-group activities such as quality circles and self-managing teams? How do they acquire expertise in these activities? Noted sociologist and management expert Robert E. Cole addresses these issues through an examination of small-group activities in the United States, Japan and Sweden during the past twenty-five years.

About this title

About the Author

Robert E. Cole is Professor of Sociology and Business Administration at the University of California, Berkeley.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Strategies for Learning: Small-Group Activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish Industry

By Robert E. Cole

University of California Press

Copyright © 1991 Robert E. Cole
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520073983
Culture and the Emergence of Small-Group Activities

Over the past twenty-five years in the advanced market economies, and even among some of the command economies, a movement has grown for building small-group activities among lower-ranking production and office employees. The term small-group activities refers to workshop- or office-based groups that are given a greater opportunity to exercise direct control over everyday work decisions and the solving of workshop problems. In the United States the rise of quality circles (employee-involvement groups) and, of late, self-managing teams has come to symbolize this movement, which has been associated in varying degrees and ways with a broader effort to expand employee participation in managerial decision making. In many countries this movement arose as a response to a crisis in management confidence that in turn derived from the need to respond to a threat to or loss of a competitive ability. The idea was to find a more effective way to recruit and make better use of employees to achieve organizational goals while satisfying the needs of individual employees for control over their immediate work environment. There were significant national variations in this regard, and indeed such variations are central to this book's strategy of analysis.

In some nations powerful currents have sustained spring tide conditions. In others the ebb tide has come quickly, and only scattered debris is left to show small-group activities having been present. In still others a riptide churns the currents in opposite direc-

tions. These disturbed currents obscure underlying movements, which only the passage of time will clarify.

The task I set myself was to analyze and understand these different currents. I wanted to understand how these activities spread—diffused—in given nations. Why had they spread more rapidly in some countries than in others? What were the channels of diffusion? Through what mechanisms and with what effect? Analysis of these movements is more complex than might initially appear to be the case; a variety of environmental factors affect the course of development of small-group activities. Moreover, management commitment to these small-group activities often displays a faddish quality.

There are compelling practical reasons for focusing on small-group activities. The failure of American business to fully use its human assets inhibits growth in quality and productivity, thereby undermining national living standards. There is good reason to believe that some competitor nations make better use of their human assets, thereby developing a competitive edge in the fierce struggle for international markets. Small-group activities allow individual workers to share their knowledge and skills and to develop them in ways that enhance economic success. This helps not only to assure the firm's success but to ensure employment security as well.

A more recent line of reasoning stresses the impact of the new technologies of flexible manufacturing and microelectronics, combined with growing worldwide competition in price and quality. In practice this means heightened pressures to produce more custom-made high-quality products and services to meet more volatile and sophisticated customer tastes. These developments are said to lead to further payoffs for increased teamwork, employee discretion, and participation to get the most out of the technology and to better respond to customer demands.

Some advocates take a different tack, starting from the proposition that small-group activities give individuals significant participation in organizational decision making. This in turn is said to be a strong democratizing force that finally brings the benefits of politi-

cal democracy into the workplace. Notions of self-governance and self-determination underlie this perspective (see Dachler and Wilpert 1978:5). This claim contrasts with the neo-Marxist view that small-group activities are just one more management technique to control workers. The neo-Marxists see these evolving practices as part of a new corporatist strategy that, by fostering a sense of participation in the organization on the part of employees, destroys collective solidarity among workers and makes them vulnerable to a higher level of management control (Edwards 1979; Burawoy 1983).

Still another view stressing the participative aspects of small-group activities emanates from the moral arena. Secular humanitarian and religious leaders focus on the significance of participation for increasing the control of individual employees over their own lives and providing an outlet for their creative talents, thereby elevating individual dignity and self-respect. The draft of the bishops' pastoral letter "Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy" (National Catholic News Service 1984), for example, states that economic activity should be an expression of the distinctive dignity of human beings and that work should enable people to find a significant measure of self-realization and creativity in their labor.

Theories of human growth and development, with their stress on self-actualization, are a related perspective deriving from social science. Theorists working in this tradition talk about the "humanization of work" and tend to see participation as a key strategy for improving employee motivation and allowing individuals thereby to achieve their true potential. The focus tends to be on the individual's relation to the work task itself rather than on questioning the broad distribution of power and decisions.

There is now significant evidence to show that Japanese firms in particular have made better use of their human resources than have the Americans; this has significant consequences for living standards and the quality of life at work. Furthermore, by effectively conducting small-group activities, Japanese firms achieve a variety of economic benefits. These involve flexibility, speed, economizing on resources, and the execution of decisions based on accurate information (see Aoki 1987). Just as it is naive to think that small-group activity inevitably leads to self-actualization and democratization, it is unduly cynical to think that it is always a corporatist strategy designed to destroy the collective solidarity of workers.

What consequences small-group activities have is above all an empirical question. In focusing on the spread of small-group activities across firms and the role of national infrastructures in promoting this, I concentrate more on management than on workers' behavior. The preceding discussion is designed simply to show the reader that the content of what is being diffused is important.

What is the contribution of a comparison of different national experiences with small-group activities? First, it is clear that there are distinctive national approaches to small-group activities. The American model stresses direct, informal participation and provides relatively limited scope for those at the bottom of the organization to participate in decision making. This is strikingly different from the more formal representational approach to participation taken in continental European nations (see Dachler and Wilpert 1978:23-25). To be sure, collective bargaining arrangements in unionized U.S. firms should rightly be seen as providing representative participation, but relatively few of these arrangements have been used explicitly to pursue individual participation in work decisions per se.

From a social science perspective, a comparison of different national experiences permits one to begin identifying the characteristic elements of successful diffusion processes. It also helps us identify those elements of the diffusion process that are unique to particular nations; such unique elements are hidden when one studies one nation's experiences. The role of culture provides a dramatic example. It is impossible to estimate its effects when examining only one culture, but in comparison with others, we have the opportunity to clarify its significance. Given the attention paid to cultural effects in the analysis of small-group activities, this leverage appears to be of considerable benefit in furthering more robust explanations. By our knowledge of unique national characteristics, we in turn enhance our understanding of contrasting social structures. As Reinhard Bendix (1956:445) has argued, if different societies over time confront and resolve a similar problem, then a comparative analysis of their divergent solutions will help us understand the divergent character of the respective social structures in a process of change.

Finally, from a policy perspective, it is instructive to see how other nations "do it," so that we may learn from their experience. There is ample evidence of cross-national flows of information about small-group activities. I shall examine how social actors in different nations have perceived and responded to such information flows. There are a great many misunderstandings, colored by national ideology and cultural traditions, about how the borrowing process operates.

At a minimum, the very fact that small-group activities in one form or another have landed on the agendas of all the market economies over the past twenty-five years is remarkable. How did this happen and why? How is it that in 1984 a draft OECD report on the worldwide automobile industry could conclude:

Although there seems to be a diversity of managerial technology development and practice in the automobile industry in various countries, the general trend is towards increased worker participation in production decision-making. The quality circle approach, involving more off-line input and cooperation between workers and management, is considered important and is being experimented with and implemented by practically all major automobile companies around the world.... There is also a trend towards giving more on-line responsibilities to the workers, ranging from preventive maintenance to quality control, and to multi-process handling…. The strongest general trend is the introduction of group work …. There is a trend away from "man-machine relations" towards "team technological system relations." This involves restructuring the production process by setting teams which often number from three to eight people. It represents a move away from assembly-line structures with their isolating and alienating effects.
(OECD 1984a: 37, 39)

The common trends described in the OECD automotive study are really quite extraordinary. In varying degrees, they have been reported for other industries as well. Are there common driving forces in each country, or is it simply a matter of "international faddism"?

A second question recognizes some of the variation internationally and leads us to ask why small-group activities ended up on the agenda earlier in one place and later in another. A focus on national differences also leads us to ask why the nature of the response has varied from one place to another. This kind of specific research is far more likely to yield useful information to makers of public policy and scholars than the recent vogue for writing vague popular

treatises on how one nation's management system is generally superior to another's.

My focus is on the evolution of small-group activities in the United States, Japan, and Sweden between the early 1960s and the mid 1980s. The stress is principally on why developments have taken the direction they have, but I also explore what paths have not been taken and why. The comparative strategy has been developed for a variety of personal and intellectual reasons. I have long believed that explicit national comparisons are to be preferred to specific national studies of work organization (which often contain implicit and unverified comparisons). As a long-term student of the Japanese situation, I noted that even when comparative studies were carried out by American scholars, they commonly compared Japan to the United States. An ethnocentric bias commonly led to the implicit judgment when explaining observed differences that we were "normal" and they were "different." Japan's recent economic ascendancy has led to some reversal of this assessment, but bias is no less apparent.

It was these kinds of reflections that led me to conclude that a well-grounded study of small-group activities that included a European country would be of considerable value in casting new light on work organization and the various options open to national actors. In fact, I was raising the N from two to three. While some would emphasize that this is still a very small number of cases, I sensed that with proper selection for maximum variation, one could get a lot of leverage from that additional case. Sweden has a strong reputation as an innovator in work organization and its selection as a third country to be compared seemed ideally suited to my aims.1

By limiting the analysis to the United States, Japan, and Sweden, I ensured linguistic competence in the three countries to be compared. This made possible field and archival research based on primary source materials, as well as interviews with key informants in their native language, and facilitated survey research on "early adopters" of quality circles in the United States and Japan.

In the case of Sweden, in addition to the voluminous scholarly and management literature on the subject in Swedish, the newspaper coverage was also extensive. This allowed a different vantage point on developments. These data sources were supplemented by interviews with key informants and recognized experts in the unions, companies, universities, the employers' confederation, and research institutes. Volvo and Saab, two major innovators, were particularly receptive to my initiatives.

For the United States a large scholarly and management literature on direct participation on the shop and office floor level exists. In addition, the author, through lecturing, consulting, and participating in professional associations, has been an active observer of, and sometimes participant in, the process of diffusing quality circles.
In the case of Japan, a significant scholarly and management literature exists on the subject in Japanese. Selected company visits and interviews supplemented this literature, as did interviews with employers' confederation officials and union leaders. The Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers (JUSE), a key actor in the diffusion of quality circles in Japan, was particularly forthcoming in its cooperation and arranged for a variety of meetings with key informants.

In speaking of small-group activities, the question inevitably arises of whether one nation can learn from another's experiences. This in turn raises the issue of culture as a potential barrier to the learning process. Powerful cultural stereotypes in each country bias how one assesses the impact of culture on the cross-national borrowing process. These stereotypes, themselves part of powerful societal ideologies, constitute an important set of resources and constraints on the learning process. As ideologies, moreover, they also distort our understanding of actual social behavior and thereby conceal important resources that are available to the learning process.

Americans and Japanese have an image of Japan as a group-based culture and of the United States as one based on individualism. Many go on to conclude that a group-based activity such as quality circles will not work in the individualistic American culture. Such stereotypes clearly have a basis in fact; Americans do have a strong tendency to assign tasks to the individual and to hold the individual accountable, while the Japanese are more inclined to assign tasks to the group and make the group accountable for performance.

These differences do have their roots in the respective national histories of the two countries, and thus constitute different cultural constraints. In the case of Japan, for example, the legal system during the Tokugawa period (1603-1867), which was based on the principle of collective responsibility, allocated complete authority and responsibility for the performance and conduct of group members to group representatives such as the village headman (see Smith 1983:38). In practice, the system operated over time to assign a high degree of autonomy to village communities and urban neighborhoods alike.

Nevertheless, these stereotypes and generalizations can be terribly misleading when it comes to assessing the practices of individual companies, whether in Japan or the United States.2 First, there is ample evidence from social science that under certain conditions, group activities and decision making can be stultifying. Consider the observations of Karl Weick (1984:22), a noted student of organizations:

Take the common demonstration that groups, in the interest of coordination, often accommodate to the least accomplished member. When this happens, members set in motion a mechanism that winnows some intelligence out of the system. In fact, most group mechanisms that have been uncovered (e.g., groups promote polarized beliefs; groups are solution centered rather than problem centered) imply that groups and organizations seem to be exquisitely organized to vulgarize their own minds.

Seen in this light, the question is not whether groups are superior to individuals or vice versa, but under what conditions and in what environments groups perform effectively.

Moreover, in the extent and nature of group activities, there is tremendous variation between firms in Japan and in the United States. Nor are group activities foreign to many American firms. In some cases, the nature of the technology or the service to be provided almost dictates group organization. Yet the teamwork imposed by management policy or dictated by technology must be distinguished from the attitudes internalized by employees. In their recent large-scale survey of workers' attitudes in Japan and the United States, Arne Kalleberg and James Lincoln (1989) report that the Japanese employees are only slightly more inclined to "favor working in groups" than their American counterparts. While the data lend themselves to a variety of possible interpretations (perhaps the Japanese respond the way they do because they have "had it" with group activity), they do suggest caution in embracing popular stereotypes too closely.

To look at the matter differently, consider the practice of individual reward and recognition. One can make the strong argument that in U.S. manufacturing firms the individual blue-collar worker is typically treated in the mass (that is, as a member of a large group) in the sense that he or she receives little recognition in the wage sys-

A biting critique of the groupism model as applied to Japan appears in Mouer and Sugimoto 1986.

tem or informally as to individual performance. The auto worker who told me during an interview, "Nobody gives a damn whether I do my job well or not!" captured this situation all too well.

Conversely, in Japan, there is tremendous effort made in personnel policy to individualize treatment of blue-collar workers and tailor training and wage increments to individual performance.3 Now in which economy is the individual "king" and in which does the group dominate? One of the major implications of this focus on the individual in the Japanese reward system for lower-ranking employees is that it leads to tremendous competition among individuals. This means that the highly publicized teamwork among Japanese workers gets played out in the context of a delicate balance between cooperation and individual competition. Such subtle relationships are notably absent from typical Western treatments of the subject, with their overwhelming focus on groupism. Yet they have been a major component in the engine driving continuous improvement activities in postwar Japanese firms.

Similarly, there is the Western image of the Japanese individual subjugating himself or herself completely to group-defined objectives. Such a view does not allow for the real life subtleties whereby individuals seek to control the definition of group objectives in ways that serve their individual interests or values. Nor does it allow us to grasp the changing situation reported in Japan whereby the individual increasingly appreciates the group to the extent that it responds to individual needs (Cummings 1980: 197).

Much of our image of the Japanese group model is an account of how human relationships ought to be. That is, it is ideology. The reality is that groups are often subject to competition and conflict, with even the appearance of harmony being quite deceptive. Moreover, Americans are misled by Japanese stereotypes of themselves as group-oriented and harmonious, just as we are misled by stereotypes of ourselves as exclusively individualistically oriented.

Americans have, in fact, conflicting cultural stereotypes. There exists a communitarian ethic in the United States that has powerful roots growing out of our traditional agricultural society. While we highlight the role of individualism, we also have a set of stereotypes, commonly emanating from the sports metaphor, that point to the powerful benefits to be achieved from teamwork. Only with

These differences do not need to be large to be significant in the eyes of the employee.

the close coordination of individual assignments are the individual talents on a football team channeled to bring about maximum group performance. These analogies are in common use in our business firms, and motivational speakers from the sports world who invoke such comparisons, like Fran Tarkenton, are in great demand for speaking engagements.

Consider also the contradiction involved when observers applaud teamwork but criticize meetings as wasteful! Again, the issue is what kinds of teamwork or meetings, under what kinds of conditions, produce what kinds of outcomes? To argue that group-based activity such as quality-control circles will not work in American firms because they violate our individualistic ethic hardly reflects the reality of competing values and circumstances.

Some Japanese scholars go so far as to argue that Japanese firms succeeded with small-group problem-solving activities in spite of not because of culture. This turns the conventional wisdom of Westerners, not to speak of Japanese traditionalists, on its head. Fujita Yoshitaka argues that only through a strong commitment and strategic and long-term efforts were Japanese managers able to overcome cultural constraints (Fujita 1982:77-86). He notes that traditionally Japanese workers were accustomed to a "do as you are told" style of work in which they had little incentive to think creatively. He sees such practices as deriving from the permanent employment and seniority wage systems, practices often associated with Japanese culture.

Similarly, Shimada Haruo argues that the cooperative labor-management relations upon which small-group activity, information sharing, and other contemporary worker-manager relationships are based, were not bestowed upon Japanese corporations from the beginning. "Rather they were constructed deliberately and at considerable cost." By cost, he refers to the difficulty of coming to terms with a hostile and aggressive labor movement in the early postwar period (Shimada 1982:246). Support for this interpretation can be found in the detailed accounts of individuals who established postwar Japanese employment practices. The Japanese Institute of Labour published a set of interviews with key figures of the postwar period in the personnel departments of major companies such as Nippon Steel and Toyota Motors. What comes through strongly in these presentations is the sense of struggle and personal hardship (expressed in rather typical Japanese melodramatic fash-

ion) experienced by those trying to create new personnel practices during a period of tumultuous upheavals (see, for example, Tanaka 1982). These perspectives provide a healthy corrective to the conventional Western view that simply sees quality-control circles as coming naturally to the Japanese by virtue of their group-oriented culture—a gross distortion of what actually happened and the amount of "sweat" involved in making it happen.

That is not to say that culture does not bestow some advantages—to be read as providing resources—on Japanese managers seeking to introduce small problem-solving groups. It is apparent as one examines the training packages of the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers and the typical packages produced by American organizations that the Americans put far more stress on group dynamics. There is an implicit assumption that Americans need more help in navigating these problems. Our supervisors seem less well trained in such techniques as individual motivation through group activity and group problem solving than are the Japanese. Small-group organization is pervasive throughout Japanese society in a way that suggests it provides a basic "code" for how contemporary Japanese think about organizing to solve problems. For example, the group organization of normal learning activities and student responsibility for classroom maintenance tasks documented in Japanese schools stands in sharp contrast to practices in American schools (Cummings 1980). It is reasonable to believe that such experiences during one's formative years provide a strong foundation for subsequent group-oriented activities.

Yet even in Japan tremendous investments were made in training and organizing to get these groups operating effectively in a new problem-solving mode (see Lillrank 1983). After all, you can have close teamwork that is not particularly task-oriented or, worse yet from management's perspective, close teamwork that operates in a way that works against formal organizational objectives. There is, in fact, a large social science literature in the United States on the way in which informal organization at work functions in exactly that fashion.

The central questions raised in this book rest on the observation that, in the main period under investigation, 1960-85, American

firms moved more slowly and less effectively in adopting small-group activities than Swedish and, especially, Japanese ones. Why was this the case? Generally speaking, the answer is to be found in a confluence of factors, ranging from different labor-market circumstances, labor-management traditions, and the predispositions of major institutional actors (especially the degree of top management consensus) to the willingness of these institutional actors to take joint action to build national infrastructures for diffusing small-group activities.

Through various comparisons I elaborate below on the relevance of these various factors and the linkages among them. Moreover, I also show how the small-group-activities movement took different forms in each country, reflecting the labor-management balance of power, cultural traditions, and, above all, the degree to which national infrastructures developed and operated to diffuse innovations effectively. I focus particularly on the evolution of these national infrastructures, for they tell us much about the commitment of various national interest groups.

The reader will note in examining the above list of causal factors that I take a decidedly "macro" approach in trying to understand what happened, or did not happen, to the small-group-activities movement in each country. It is only in this fashion that one is able to distinguish the forest from the trees. Much contemporary theorizing and empirical research on small-group activities involves researchers, especially industrial or organizational psychologists, reporting factors within organizations that inhibit or enhance the probability of success (Dachler and Wilpert 1978:29-35). Success is typically measured in terms of survival of the innovation or contributions to improved quality and productivity, increased participation, job satisfaction, or reduced employee turnover and absenteeism. The critical factors typically identified as responsible for these outcomes include the mode of innovation, the amount of authority given to group sponsors and leaders, the makeup of the group, its leadership, the group's procedures and objectives, the nature of the organization's technology, how the small-group activities fit in with wider organizational practices, and so forth.

A pattern emerges (also seen in other domains of organizational research) of a variety of often contradictory studies showing how under different conditions one or another micro variable contrib-

utes marginally to affecting outcomes. Charles Perrow (1979:96-112) documents just such a pattern in his scathing critique of the accumulated human-relations literature, showing how it fails to demonstrate a clear link between leadership and morale on the one hand and productivity on the other. The application of increasingly complex research methodologies and causal models has only resulted in a loss of applicability and theoretical power. The variables become so numerous that one can hardly generalize to organizations or even to types of organizations.

By shifting from the micro analysis of the social phenomenon under examination to a macro analysis, the opportunity develops for grasping the broader environmental factors behind innovation. As Perrow (1979: 110) puts it, "It may be, hopefully, that any theory that has the power to explain a good deal of organizational behavior will have to deal with more general variables than leadership and small-group behavior." In emphasizing such macro explanations as I do, I further assume that the micro variables associated with small-group behavior are randomly distributed and thus have little effect when a large number of organizations are being studied.

In keeping with this vision, I show the importance of understanding the position of the national business leadership toward such innovations. Also to be considered is how these positions interact with national labor-market conditions as well as other variables. In summary, the overall perspective adopted in this book is that this macro approach will produce a far better and more generalizable understanding of the spread of small-group activities across and within firms than a detailed analysis of what makes small-group activities work or not work in particular organizational settings.

This is not to say that I ignore all the micro factors on which many of these outcomes rest. The decision by individual firms to invest in building a national infrastructure rests on the trade-offs these firms perceive, and they will be the subject of further discussion.

Continues...

Excerpted from Strategies for Learning: Small-Group Activities in American, Japanese, and Swedish Industryby Robert E. Cole Copyright © 1991 by Robert E. Cole. Excerpted by permission.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0520073983
• ISBN 13: 9780520073982
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 364