Employee involvement and participation

Abstract

It is 8 a.m. and the start of another shift in the press shop at the Nissan car plant in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. The supervisor and the twenty men (comprising two teams, each with a team leader) leave the meeting room where they have been chatting and reading newspapers prior to the shift commencing, and go out onto the shopfloor. They congregate in a circle by the presses while the supervisor discusses a problem they had encountered the previous day with some faulty pressings, which had got through as far as the paint shop. The upshot of this discussion is that one of the group is detailed to go down to the paint shop and go through the stack of parts waiting to be painted, in order to find the faulty ones (Popham, 1992).