Managing Change

4‐1Moving from Individual Work to Cooperation

Why Work Is Being Done Individually

The individual approach to work can be seen in many different industries. In sales, each employee is assigned their own clients or areas, and they deal with them on their own. In planning and development, the parts and portions of the product being developed are distributed to different employees, and each one works on the part they've been assigned to. In manufacturing factories, each person has a process or machine assigned to them, and they monitor these and deal with any trouble that arises on their own.

The common factor here is that our current approach to work basically consists of dividing the whole into parts and assigning each part to an individual. That is, we've come to prefer division of labor. The tendency to deal with assigned work on one's own is the individual approach to work.

Until around the 1980s, teamwork was deemed to be a strong point in Japanese industries. American culture, on the other hand, is founded on individualism People discussed how to improve their product in Quality Control Circles. They tried to increase productivity in small groups and exchanged ideas in informal discussions. American culture, on the other hand, is based on individualism, but many American companies have incorporated Quality Control Circles and the related concept of Kaizen groups to improve ...