A new approach in analysing social-technical roles at Toyota: the team leader

Many companies have attempted to imitate and copy Toyota's team leader position in the implementation of lean manufacturing. Unfortunately, most observations of this role fail to quantify and accurately represent how this role is designed and integrated into Toyota's complicated lean production system. This work combines classical role theory and latent semantic analysis (LSA) in the study and classification of the team leader role. The findings of this work are that the team leader role shares many of the rights and obligations of that of the group leader. This new insight and others, provide an increased understanding of the training and development needs of the team leader role in social-technical environments. Lastly, this mathematical analysis can be used to visualise many unique role features and components of a role that has traditionally been unidentified using observation and interviewing techniques.

[1]  R. Kahn,et al.  The Social Psychology of Organizations , 1966 .

[2]  K. A. Brown,et al.  A socio-technical systems approach to cell design: case study and analysis , 1999 .

[3]  Ashutosh Tiwari,et al.  Good operations practice supervisor profiles in cell-centric manufacturing , 2008 .

[4]  R. Kahn,et al.  Organizational Stress: Studies in Role Conflict and Ambiguity. , 1965 .

[5]  K. S. Park,et al.  Performance obstacles in cellular manufacturing implementation— empirical investigation , 2002 .

[6]  M. Wickham,et al.  Reconceptualising organisational role theory for contemporary organisational contexts , 2007 .

[7]  Peter Turnbull,et al.  The ‘Japanisation’ of production and industrial relations at Lucas Electrical , 1986 .

[9]  Roberto Panizzolo,et al.  The assessment of work organization in lean production: the relevance of the worker’s perspective , 2000 .

[10]  T. Landauer,et al.  A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge. , 1997 .

[11]  Gene H. Golub,et al.  Calculating the singular values and pseudo-inverse of a matrix , 2007, Milestones in Matrix Computation.

[12]  Ronald G. Askin,et al.  Forming effective worker teams for cellular manufacturing , 2001 .

[13]  Ronald A. Ash,et al.  Evaluation Of Job Analysis Methods By Experienced Job Analysts , 1983 .

[14]  R. Likert,et al.  New Patterns of Management. , 1963 .

[15]  J. Liker.  The Toyota Way , 2003 .

[16]  SommervilleIan,et al.  Socio-technical systems , 2011 .

[17]  Kenneth L. Schultz,et al.  Modeling and worker motivation in JIT production systems , 1998 .

[18]  James Lowe,et al.  MANUFACTURING REFORM AND THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE PRODUCTION SUPERVISOR -- THE CASE OF THE AUTOMOBILE INDUSTRY. , 1993 .

[19]  Harvey Robbins,et al.  Why Teams Don't Work , 1995 .

[20]  Taiichi Ohno,et al.  Toyota Production System : Beyond Large-Scale Production , 1988 .

[21]  Terry L. Besser,et al.  Team Toyota : transplanting the Toyota culture to the Camry plant in Kentucky , 1997 .

[22]  E. Schein.  Career Dynamics: Matching Individual and Organizational Needs , 1978 .

[23]  Nicholas Beaumont,et al.  Best Practice in Australian manufacturing sites , 2005 .

[24]  Lee Luong,et al.  Team‐based cellular manufacturing , 2007 .

[25]  Harry Barton,et al.  Organizing for continuous improvement: Structures and roles in automotive components plants , 2002 .

[26]  Russell Albright,et al.  Skinning the Cat: Comparing Alternative Text Mining Algorithms for Categorization , 2001 .

[27]  Tony Elger.  Technical Innovation and Work Reorganisation in British Manufacturing in the 1980s: Continuity, Intensification or Transformation? , 1990 .

[28]  Ophir Frieder,et al.  Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics , 1998 .

[29]  John Thomas,et al.  Operation KPE: Developing a New Organization , 1968 .

[30]  Christopher A. Voss,et al.  Case research in operations management , 2002 .

[31]  Bopaya Bidanda,et al.  Worker assignment in cellular manufacturing considering technical and human skills , 2002 .

[32]  Bopaya Bidanda,et al.  Human related issues in manufacturing cell design, implementation, and operation: a review and survey , 2005, Comput. Ind. Eng..

[33]  B. Biddle.  Role Theory: Expectations, Identities, and Behaviors , 1979 .

[34]  Inyong Ham,et al.  Layout Planning for Group Technology , 1985 .

[35]  T. Landauer,et al.  Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis , 1990 .

[36]  Jeffrey K. Liker,et al.  Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way , 2008 .

[37]  R. Schroeder,et al.  Manufacturing practices, strategic fit and performance: A routine‐based view , 2004 .