Job design under lean manufacturing and the quality of working life: a job demands and resources perspective
Cullinane, Sarah-Jane
(2014)
Job design under lean manufacturing and the quality of working life: a job demands and resources perspective.
PhD thesis, Dublin City University.
Studies to date which examine the quality of working life under lean manufacturing have yielded contradictory findings, whereby positive, negative and contingent effects on employee well-being have been demonstrated. A large contributor to these inconsistencies is the absence of an applicable model of job design which captures the complex socio-technical nature of this context. This research proposes and tests a model of job design under lean manufacturing using the Job Demands-Resources framework in order to capture the distinct motivational and health-impairing potential of this context. Cross-sectional data was collected from 200 employees working in a multi-national pharmaceutical manufacturing organisation with extensive lean usage. The findings supported hypotheses relating to the direct and interactive effects of lean-specific resources and demands in the prediction of employee work engagement and exhaustion. In addition, the findings from a multilevel daily diary study using a subsample of 64 employees demonstrated that jobs designed according to lean manufacturing principles facilitate job crafting activities on a daily basis. Furthermore the findings support the hypothesised relationship between daily job crafting (resource and challenge-seeking) and daily work engagement. Overall, the three studies presented in this thesis support the application and adaption of the JD-R framework to the lean manufacturing context at both stable and temporal levels. It supports recent claims that this type of work environment has both positive and negative effects for employees, and provides solutions as to how lean-specific resources and demands can be balanced to create jobs which are equally enriched and efficient. Recommendations are made for practitioners using lean manufacturing systems which encourage them to stimulate the motivational potential of the demands associated with this high-involvement, fast-paced work environment by complementing them with the appropriate job resources.