Obstacles to Understanding and Using Statistical Process Control as a Productivity Improvement Approach

Statistical process control (SPC) enables workers to detect variability in work processes and outputs. To improve productivity, workers must understand and respond appropriately to such variability. In this paper, we describe some psychological obstacles that prevent individuals from fully understanding and using SPC effectively. Specifically, we discuss obstacles that result from general tendencies in human judgment and from biases in causal attributions.