Serviço The Hovey Beard and Company

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The Hovey and Beard Company manufactures wooden toys of various kinds: wooden animals, pull toys, and the like. One part of the manufacturing process involved spraying paint on the partially assembled toys and hanging them on moving hooks which carried them through a drying oven. This operation was plagued

5 by absenteeism, turnover, and low morale.

Let us look briefly at the painting operation in which the problem occurred. The toys were cut, sanded, and partially assembled in the wood room.

Then they were dipped into shellac, following which they were painted. The toys were predominantly two-

colored; a few were made in more than two colors. Each color required an additional trip through the paint 10 room.

Shortly before the troubles began, the painting operation had been reengineered so that the eight employees who did the painting sat in a line by an endless chain of hooks. These hooks were in continuous motion, past the line of painters and into a long horizontal oven. Each employee sat at a painting booth so designed as to carry away fumes and to backstop excess paint. The painter would take a toy from an adjacent tray, position

15 it in a jig inside the painting cubicle, spray on the color according to a pattern, then release the toy and hang it on the hook passing by. The rate at which the hooks moved had been calculated by the engineers so that each employee, when fully trained, would be able to hang a painted toy on each hook before it passed beyond reach.

The employees working in the paint room were on a group bonus plan.

20 Since the operation was new to them, they were receiving a learning bonus which decreased by regular amounts each month. The learning bonus was scheduled to vanish in six months, by which time it was expected that they would be on their own - that is, able to meet the standard and to earn a group bonus when they exceeded it.

By the second month of the training period, trouble had developed. The painters learned more slowly than 25 had been anticipated, and it began to look as though their production would stabilize far below what was

planned for. Many of the hooks were going by empty. The painters complained that they were going by too fast and that the time-study engineers had set the rates wrong. A few employees quit and had to be replaced, which further aggravated the learning problem. The team spirit that the management had expected to develop automatically through the group bonus was not in evidence except as an expression of what the

30 engineers called "resistance." One painter whom the group regarded as its leader (and the management regarded as the ringleader) was outspoken in making the various complaints of the group to the supervisor. The complaints had all the variety customary in such instances of generalized frustration: the job was a messy one, the hooks moved too fast, the incentive pay was not being correctly calculated, and anyway it was too hot working so close to the drying oven.

35 [A] consultant ... was brought into this picture [and] worked entirely with and through the supervisor. After many conversations with the consultant the supervisor felt that the first step should