CASE STUDY

The Hovey and Beard Company Case

The Hovey and Beard Company Case

Introduction

The Hovey and Beard Company is a manufacturer of wooden toys from different kinds: wooden animals, toys and similar traction. Some manufacturing the process involves spray paint on toys partially assembles and placing them on hooks phones that carry oven that is drying up. This operation was plagued by absenteeism, turnover and low morale. Here, the briefly painting operation where the problem occurred, were cut, fixed and partially assembled toys. Subsequently dipped in shellac, after which they painted. Toys were predominantly of two colours and only a few were made of two colours masked. Little time before the problems began was restructured operation paint, so that eight employees who performed the task sixty in line next to a continuous chain of hooks. This chain was moving in a continuous line passing painters and reached large horizontal furnace. Each employee is sitting in a booth designed so that vapours are extracted and removed from excess paint. The painter took a toy from an adjacent tray, placed it in a riddle inside a paint booth, spray painting a color according to a pattern, pulled the toy and we placed the hook that would from. Los engineers had calculated the speed at which they moved the hooks, so every employee, once trained, were able to put the toy in the hook before this scope.

Discussion

The main goal of reinforcement theory is the belief that human behaviour is caused by the knowledge, awareness of the consequences of these behaviours. Human behaviour is a function of its kind received rewards and punishments. If we want to improve behaviour (make it more frequent, more intense) after maintaining the use of positive consequences (reward, praise, etc) But if we want to reduce certain behaviours (make it less intense, less likely), we use the negative consequences. In turn, if we want a certain behaviour disappeared, and then ignores them (Peccei, 2004).

Job Design

Job design describes the characteristics and working conditions of a workplace in a broader scope. In a narrow sense and also as part of this study, job design will be seen as describing features of the workplace which relate to the content of the job. In particular, we will distinguish enriched from classic or tayloristic job design that is being seen in the company of Hovey and Beard. Job enrichment thereby refers to the enrichment of the workplace because of diversified tasks and autonomous job designs. This definition of enriched job design is related to "innovative" or "new" job design (Bauer, 2004) or work practices. These modem or high involvement work practices address the composition of the workplace based on psychological aspects. The conventional work organization relates however more too specialized or even monotonies work with less autonomy. The term "specialized" may not be mixed with the term "qualified" because "specialized" describes the concentration on a certain narrowly defined kind of work or task. In particular, it does not evoke a special qualification ...