Reforming Management

"‘ Flexible’ Workplace Practices: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Survey" by Maury Gittleman, Michael Horrigan, and Mary Joyce, in Industrial and Labor Relations Review (Oct. 1998), Cornell Univ., Ithaca, N.Y. 14853–3901.

Consultants and other experts have spilled much ink in recent years touting new styles of business management that supposedly improve corporate performance. If what their advocates say about "Total Quality Management," "quality circles," job rotation, and other such nostrums is true, then surely most companies would have embraced one or another of them by now. Well, it seems, they have and they haven’t.

Out of nearly 6,000 firms surveyed in 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) found that only 42 percent had adopted any of a half-dozen specified alternative practices. Not surprisingly, such arrangements were most popular with manufacturing firms (56 percent adopted at least one), though establishments in wholesale trade were a close second (55 percent).

Total Quality Management (which, survey takers were told, stresses "doing things right the first time, striving for continuous improvement, and... meeting customer needs") found favor with 21 percent of the firms. Sixteen percent let workers have a say in buying the equipment they use, 14 percent gave small teams of workers authority over how best to get their collective job done, 13 percent permitted workers to rotate among different jobs, 11 percent had coworkers evaluate a worker’s performance, and only five percent opted for quality circles (in which groups of workers meet for an hour or so each week to try to solve work-related problems).

While most of the 5,987 firms—58 percent—had not adopted even one of the alternative practices, and 21 percent had implemented only one, the picture changed dramatically when firm size was taken into account, note Gittleman, a BLS economist, and his colleagues. Nearly 70 percent of establishments with 50 or more employees had embraced at least one of the new approaches. Though some analysts have argued that small businesses, being less bureaucratic, are more likely to experiment, the larger firms seem more inclined to make strides toward the "flexible" workplace. Yet the authors are also struck by the finding that no single "best practice" was embraced by a large number of firms. It could be that many techniques work only in certain kinds of settings, or that firms are still feeling their way—or that the techniques actually yield only modest results.