Total quality management and work organization: Relationship between quality management strategies and work organization in Swedish industrial companies

The effects of integrated manufacturing on job characteristics

“…Finally, some case studies show that TQM does not always lead automatically to an increase in job autonomy. For example, Bengtsson and Ljungström (1998), in a study of nine Swedish companies, show that the strategies followed for work organisation in the implementation of quality management are varied, ranging from a strategy of control similar to Taylorism, with a hierarchical organisation and limited responsibility for the shopfloor workers, to a strategy of reorganisation, where efforts are spent on decentralisation.…”

“…The philosophy of TQM, as explained by its theorists, is clearly oriented to the development of an organisation with reduced hierarchies, decentralised power to the shopfloor, high levels of employee participation, and therefore with operators having wide job autonomy (Bengtsson and Ljungström, 1998), especially in quality and continuous improvement issues (Niepce and Molleman, 1996). The goal of doing things right the first time leads to the expectation that employees are provided with the power to solve problems and to improve the way they perform their job (Patterson et al.…”

A review of post-modern management techniques as currently applied to Turkish forestry

“…This is a Japanese word which means continuous improvement. Kaizen states that change and improvement in an enterprise must be enduring, even if changes are made in small increments (Gondhalekar et al, 1995;Bengtsson and Ljungstrom, 1998). Kaizen means the systematic and continuous improvement of all functions in an institution (product, service and process).…”

How to carry out sustainable change? An analysis of introducing manufacturing cells in a Finnish engineering company

“…Instead, organizations were to be lean, networked, and process-based. The key elements of these new models were teamwork, decentralization of responsibilities, a new kind of supervisor, cooperative networks, and process thinking (Bengtsson and Ljungström, 1998;Genaidy & Karwowski, 2003, Womack, Jones, & Roos, 1990.…”