Dawson, Altricia Nyoka (2019) Understanding how national culture influences productivity through the cognitive and social behaviours of production workers. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

The globalisation of manufacturing has occurred rapidly over the past half-century. It was facilitated by the lowering of trade barriers and the technological transformation of the factory, which has made managing multinational operations easier. As part of the globalisation of manufacturing, multinational corporations established operating facilities in countries with lower production costs and in countries where indigenous production was required. This required production systems developed in one context to be transferred and deployed in another, and the management of production workers from culturally diverse backgrounds.

The main objective of this research is to understand how national culture influences the behaviour of production workers and moderates the relationship between worker behaviour and manufacturing performance. To investigate these behavioural influences an experimental design of the paper airplane manufacturing simulation was used to measure worker behaviour and manufacturing performance in tasks configured for the mass, lean and craft production systems. Two types of worker behaviour are investigated, cognitive behaviours and social behaviours. Cognitive behaviour is explored as the systematic differences in how workers from different national cultures perceive manufacturing tasks through event segmentation. Event segmentation is a strand of the wider theories on chunking which measures how people parse events for memory and recall. In the case of manufacturing, this theory is used to measure how workers identify boundaries or breakpoints in assembly. In so doing, an objective measure of perception was obtained. Social behaviour in the form of direct feedback and social support from co-workers is measured using workers’ responses on work design questionnaire scales. The impact of these behaviours on manufacturing performance is analysed for a British and Chinese sample using multilevel linear modelling (MLM).

The results show that national culture affects both cognitive and social behaviours. Chinese workers perceive fewer event segments in the manufacturing task than British workers. Also, Chinese workers are more incline to receive feedback and social support from co-workers. Often, production workers are visible to each other to enable greater utilisation of space and the increased facilitation of interdependence. This viii study demonstrates that indirect feedback from being able to see co-workers’ performance was positively related to productivity. National culture moderates the effect of cognitive behaviour on productivity. This moderated relationship was such that event segmentation only significantly relates to the performance of Chinese workers in the most flexible task configuration. National culture did not moderate the effect of social behaviour on productivity.

These findings demonstrate that the influence of task configurations on manufacturing performance may not be universal, as the impact of worker behaviour on productivity was different between specialised and flexible configurations. Moreover, these findings contribute to understanding the behaviours of production workers and how these behaviours are influenced by national culture. There are also practical implications for reducing testing and ramp-up costs in configuring manufacturing tasks and production systems as operations expand globally.

Item Type:	Thesis or Dissertation (PhD)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Organizational behavior, Production management, Personnel management, Performance
Official Date:	September 2019
Dates:	Date Event September 2019 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Warwick Business School
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Johnson, Mark (associate professor)
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	viii, 177 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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