04).Training, Employee Involvement and Continuous Improvement

 

04).Training, Employee Involvement and Continuous Improvement

 

Employee involvement and commitment is strongly related to the success of continuous improvement (Coyle-Shapiro 2002; Jurburg et al. 2017; Lleo et al. 2017; Costa et al. 2019). Consequently, various antecedents are reported in the production and operations management literature to increase employee involvement and commitment in improvement programmes, such as empowerment, participation in goal setting, decentralised decision-making, performance measurement system, financial and non-financial rewards, training and hav1ing a common improvement method, i.e. a standard set of steps and tools used during improvement projects that promotes a common understanding of how to come to improvements (Dow, Samson, and Ford 1999; Cua, McKone, and Schroeder 2001; Brun 2011; Sila and Ebrahimpour 2003; Marodin and Saurin 2013; Costa et al. 2019). Training has indeed been promoted as an important mechanism to facilitate continuous improvement as it increases employee’s self-efficacy for continuous improvement (Ahmed, Loh, and Zairi 1999; Bevilacqua, Ciarapica, and De Sanctis 2017; Aloini, Martini, and Pellegrini 2011).

‘Commitment and involvement’ and ‘participation and empowerment’ are the most important critical success factors of lean management, but did not indicate how these factors are related, let alone how they reinforce each other. Nevertheless, training is considered an enabling HR-practice to empower employees to enhance their self-efficacy and commitment for continuous improvement (Jurburg et al. 2017). A well-trained and committed employee tends to work more efficiently and effectively to improve performance (Kim, Kumar, and Kumar 2012). In contrast, lack of training and lack of commitment are cited as major causes of unsuccessful continuous improvement initiatives (Cua, McKone, and Schroeder 2001; McLean, Antony, and Dahlgaard 2017).

Training is needed for developing employee involvement and participation in various quality and process improvement concepts (Kim, Kumar, and Kumar 2012). Researchers have confirmed that training is a basic factor in the success of quality management implementation (Flynn, Sakakibara, and Schroeder 1995; Anderson, Rungtusanatham, and Schroeder 1994; Kitapçi and Sezen 2007). Based on a multisite, longitudinal case study Netland (2016) stated that ‘training and education’, ‘commitment and involvement’ and ‘participation and empowerment’ are the most important critical success factors of lean management, but did not indicate how these factors are related, let alone how they reinforce each other. Nevertheless, training is considered an enabling HR-practice to empower employees to enhance their self-efficacy and commitment for continuous improvement (Jurburg et al. 2017). A well-trained and committed employee tends to work more efficiently and effectively to improve performance (Kim, Kumar, and Kumar 2012). In contrast, lack of training and lack of commitment are cited as major causes of unsuccessful continuous improvement initiatives (Cua, McKone, and Schroeder 2001; McLean, Antony, and Dahlgaard 2017).

 

 Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement is the systematic effort to seek out and apply new ways of doing work i.e. actively and repeatedly making process improvements (Anand et al. 2009). It is a learning process of gradual accumulation of experimentations whereby a continuous stream of incremental innovations emerge (Bessant and Francis , 1999). Continuous improvement constitutes the development of specific abilities within the organization, for example the ability to find and solve problems systematically or the ability to share knowledge across intra-organizational boundaries (Bessant, Caffyn, and Gallagher 2001). It requires an organisation-wide commitment and arrangements to support the analysis and improvement of procedures, processes and products & services. Such a capability includes an organisational infrastructure and climate that constantly guides organisational members to strive for continuous improvement and learning (Anand et al. 2009).

Continuous improvement leads to higher operational and financial performance because of the elimination of unnecessary variability (Hopp and Spearman 2004), the reduction of non-value added activities and hence an increase of customer value and satisfaction (Singh and Singh 2015). In addition, continuous improvement seems to function as a kind of a fitness factor that enlarges the impact of other practices on performance (Bortolotti et al. 2015),

 

 

Enabling factors of continuous improvement are leadership commitment (Zu, Robbins, and Fredendall 2010), the creation of a continuous improvement culture (Irani, Beskese, and Love 2004), empowerment (Hirzel, Leyer, and Moormann 2017), participative goal setting for continuous improvement (Jurburg et al. 2017), information provisioning and visual performance management (Eaidgah et al. 2016), employee involvement (Lleo et al. 2017), a structured method (Yang, Lee, and Cheng 2016) and training (Jurburg et al. 2017).

 

 Employee involvement, participative goal setting and continuous improvement

Empowerment is also an important antecedent of continuous improvement. Spreitzer (1995), for instance, argued that empowerment leads to a proactive orientation towards the job and related work processes. Indeed, empowered employees actively create, shape and alter their working environments (Parker and Collins 2010); they are likely to have an open attitude towards errors, seeing them not as failures but as opportunities for learning and further improvements and innovation. Empowered employees are more proactive and continuously seek opportunities to improve and revise work processes, and seek innovative solutions to more complex work problems (Kirkman and Rosen 1999). Empowerment is associated with frequently taking action on problems and improve the quality of work by initiating changes in the way work is carried out (Wellins, Byham, and Wilson 1991) which leads to higher job performance and productivity (Spreitzer 1995; Conger and Kanungo 1988; Kirkman and Rosen 1999). Hence, empowerment is related to exploitative learning. In addition, empowered employees feel safe and trust their leaders to support and reward them for creative initiatives, even when these initiatives fail to meet their expected goals (Caniëls, Neghina, and Schaetsaert 2017) Empowered employees, who are also responsible for quality and continuous improvement, frequently collect data to measure possible discrepancies at work, which allow them to continuously improve their work and related processes (Kirkman and Rosen 1999). 

 

 Participation in goal setting for continuous improvement positively moderates the relationship between employee involvement and continuous improvement.

 

Figure 1. Research model.

 

This corresponds with the common view of empirical researchers such as Flynn, Sakakibara, and Schroeder (1995), Ravichandran and Rai (2000), and Kaynak (2003) that training is needed for developing employee participation in improvement efforts. It also shows that having a company-wide common improvement method that guides employees how to continuously improvement their work-processes is positively related to employee involvement in continuous improvement. Both infrastructural mechanisms help organizational members with dissimilar backgrounds to come together and develop a common understanding about how to conduct continuous improvement activities. However, their  study provides a more nuanced picture than the current literature on this topic provides: training for continuous improvement and the use of a common improvement method indeed facilitate employee involvement in continuous improvement, but if the training and the adherence to the use of a standard improvement method becomes too rigid, then these mechanisms may hamper employee creativity and discourage employees and the increase in employee involvement due to training for continuous improvement is dampened. Continuous improvement may indeed flourish if it is supported by an infrastructure of which training and having a common improvement method are important parts (Anand et al. 2009), but it is required that employees perceive this as helpful in their work.

 

An additional finding of this study is that participative goal setting positively relates to continuous improvement, though they did not find an interaction between employee involvement and participative goal setting for continuous improvement like their hypothesized. Though employee participation in goal setting is found to be important for continuous improvement (Oliver 2009) their study shows that it does not strengthen employee involvement. This concurs to the results of Erez and Arad (1986) that participation in setting goals leads to higher commitment than curtly telling people what to do with no explanation, but it does not lead to (practically significant) higher commitment than providing a convincing rationale for an assigned goal. In addition, self-set goals can be highly effective in gaining commitment, although they may not always be set as high as another person would assign (Locke 1996). Indeed, improvement goals can also be set from the outside, for instance based on benchmarking (Kelly 2016), by top down target setting from upper management through the translation of the (operations) strategy, but it can also be set up internally by means of so-called board sessions and daily stand-up meetings (Kilduff, Funk, and Mehra 1997). By having employees brainstorm themselves what could be better, what the improvement potential is, there is more commitment and involvement of employees to realize these goals.

 

 

 

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