95
The Key Principles of Process Manager
Motivation in Production and Administration
Processes in an Industrial Enterprise
Chromjaková Felicita
Abstract
The basic premise of sustainable development is that companies should completely re-evaluate
their enterprise work logic and process organization. Most of the necessary changes concern
employee stimulation and motivation. If we are truly interested in improving business results
and the effectiveness of business processes – there would be no progress otherwise – we have
to strive to break down the barriers between company management (leadership) and employees
in order to establish effective relationships between firms and customers. This paper presents
research results of process manager activities in modern industrial enterprises, connected with
a methodology proposal for the systematically-oriented process manager motivation of employ
-
ees in accordance with the increased competitiveness of production and administration proc-
esses. It also presents an effective methodology of how to increase the positive effects of well-
defined employee motivations from the process manager´s perspective. The core benefit of this
methodology lies in the design of a systematic approach to the motivation process from the
process manager side, allowing for radical performance improvement via production and ad-
ministrative processes and the increased competitiveness of enterprise processes.
Keywords: process manager, efficiency, effectiveness, motivation
JEL Classification: O330
1. GOALS OF THE CONTRIBUTION
Firstly it is necessary clearly formulate the goals of this contribution from scientific and practi-
cal point of view. Based on the analysis of selected parameters of production and administra-
tive processes in industrial companies to identify the systematic oriented key process manager
activities that lead to unambiguous and continuous growth of process performance in industrial
enterprise. Next to formulate basic pillars of motivation criterions connected with reporting
analytics; both are leading to the effective continuous improvement of enterprise processes.
Scientific contribution of this paper lies in development of new model of measurable motivation
metrics enabled the positive reaction on the stabile performance improvement.
Practical effects of this contribution are in the proposal of systematic ability of process manager
better to coordinate production and administration processes as a whole through set of effective
and measurable process steps oriented on the competitiveness improvement.
Change management has been a major focus of process excellence teams for a number of years
recently. Many of our employees will never honestly share the ideas of our company unless they
are convinced of the validity of the new processes initiating before it even began. People are not
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Vol. 8, Issue 1, pp. 95 - 110, March 2016
ISSN 1804-171X (Print), ISSN 1804-1728 (On-line), DOI: 10.7441/joc.2016.01.07
Journal of Competitiveness
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Journal of Competitiveness 96
stressed for the reason of having too many changes in organizations, but for the reason of the
way the change is made. The process might increase productivity on a paper. However, what
about the existing pressure on our staff?
Leadership is not a sort of manipulation – it depends mainly on integrity and it has an extraordi
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nary power. Leadership, as it is, can make the difference between success and failure in anything
you do for yourself or any group you belong to. Regardless of your own abilities, there are many
important goals that you cannot attain without the help of others. Leadership is the changing
of a man’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a man’s performance to a higher standard, the
building of a man’s personality beyond its normal limitations.
Enterprises will seek to map their processes on a daily basis; they derive their operational and
strategic plans from this strategy. Fulfilment of target parameters defined by enterprise outputs
is a question of a good corporate alchemy that takes into account available corporate DNA and
customer’s DNA.
Increasing the efficiency of production and administrative processes in a company requires cer
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tain skills, abilities, knowledge and behaviours. Many companies are looking for a comprehen
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sive alternative of increasing the efficiency of their own processes, striving for minimum effort
to deal with complicated market opportunities.
2. LITERATURE REVIEW
We consider the case in which all workers can be trained on all tasks, the workforce is a resource
that determines the capacity and a complete forecasting of demand is not available (Olivella
& Nembhard, 2015). We find the strongest effect for employees with the lowest levels of firm
tenure. This is a quite novel result as this group should face the lowest separation costs, for in
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stance, due to the accumulation of firm-specific human capital. Hence, intra-firm trainings are
an important retention device, especially for newly or recently hired employees. Furthermore,
a short-term decrease in absenteeism indicates a temporary, reciprocal reaction by employees
(Kampkotter & Marggraf, 2015).
A typical target firm improves production efficiency in the 3 years after intervention, with
stronger improvements in business strategy-oriented interventions. Plants sold after interven-
tion improve productivity significantly under new ownership, suggesting that capital redeploy-
ment is an important channel for value creation. Employees of target firms experience stagna-
tion in work hours and wages despite an increase in labor productivity (Brav, Jiang, & Kim,
2015). The results identify four organizational climate dimensions that focus on HR issues and
work environments. Based on the suggestions of the competing values framework and also on
the literature concerning studies of societal culture, we labeled these climate dimensions as: 1)
collaboration; 2) competition; 3) control; and 4) family-orientation. These dimensions are seen
to offer a path for future research on organizational climate and human resource management,
and how employee’s perceptions of the HR policies, practices and procedures may influence the
efficacy of the HR function. Implications for studying these phenomena across different socie-
ties are addressed (Dastmaichian, McNeil, Blyton, Bacon, & Blunsdon, 2015).
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Despite SMEs having limited resources, the results show a significant section of SMEs to be
innovative and entrepreneurial organizations, embracing advancements in employment relations
regarding employee discretion, training, participative working arrangements, and/or job secu-
rity. Moreover, results indicate that WFPs have the potential to assist SMEs in responding to
periods of constrained demand. Flexi time and job sharing are associated with low permanent-
employee redundancies. Training, job security, and family-friendly practices relate to low absen-
teeism with reductions of up to six annual days per worker. Job security and profit-related pay
are associated with high financial turnover. Staff pay-freeze links with high financial turnover,
but to the detriment of redundancies and absenteeism, whereas management pay-cuts or man-
agement pay-freeze relate to low financial turnover. On a cautionary note, spending cuts, often
enforced by policymakers, may be of limited benefit to SMEs, and thus other approaches would
appear more fruitful (Whyman, & Petrescu, 2015).The results suggest that middle managers’
disposition towards proactiveness and innovativeness is positively related to their creative per-
formance, and their internal bonding networks and upper management networks are found to
strengthen the effects of entrepreneurial orientation on creative performance. However, middle
managers’ external bridging networks are found to have an inverted U-shaped curvilinear rela-
tionship with their creative performance, and to weaken the effect of entrepreneurial orientation
on creative performance. These findings give echo to the interactions perspective of creativity,
implying that middle managers should manage their social networks more carefully, as social
interaction with network actors may either facilitate or inhibit their creativity at work (Chen,
Chang, & Chang, 2015).
Ergonomics interventions have the potential to improve operational performance and employee
well-being. When the organization used ergonomics to promote performance and well-being
equally, and at a high level, employees reported less work-related pain. A larger discrepancy
between measures of operational performance and employee well-being was associated with
increased reports of work-related pain. The direction of this discrepancy was not significantly
related to work-related pain, such that it didn’t matter which facet was valued more (Hoffmeister,
Gibbons, Schwatka, & Rosecrance, 2015).Our empirical findings support a positive relationship
between three measures of workplace performance (financial performance, employees produc-
tivity and product or service quality) and average employee trust at both points in time. Moreo-
ver, this relationship holds when we jointly model average employee trust and firm performance
in an instrumental variable framework in order to take into account the potential endogeneity of
employee trust. Our findings suggest that restricting paid overtime and access to training poten-
tially erode employee trust. In addition, we find that job or work reorganization experienced at
either the employee or organization level is associated with lower employee trust (Brown, Gray,
McHardy, & Taylor, 2015).
Employees who reported having experienced work environment problems but also fair leader-
ship, good social climate, role clarity and control of decision had significantly lower levels of pro-
duction loss, whereas employees who reported inequality and high decision demands reported
significantly higher levels of production loss. Never or seldom experiencing fair leadership, role
clarity, equality, decision demands and good social climate increase the risk of production loss
due to work environment problems, compared to those who experience these circumstances
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Journal of Competitiveness 98
frequently, always or most of the time. Several psychosocial work factors are identified as fac-
tors associated with a reduced risk of production losses among employees despite the nature
of the work environment problem. Knowledge of these factors may be important not only to
reduce employee ill-health and the corresponding health-related production loss, but also reduce
immediate production loss due to work environment-related problems (Karlsson, Hagberg, &
Bergstrom, 2015).
Although various studies have investigated the changes in control systems due to the implemen-
tation of lean production, only a few studies have explored the effects of the remaining tradi
-
tional controls on lean implementations. The new concept of control may co-exist with the tradi-
tional concept, but particularly at their interfaces, tensions may arise (Tillema, & Steen, 2015).
3. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGY
Based on the latest knowledge in the area of process manager motivation in industrial compa-
nies, core questions of research reflect the need to identify absolutely important milestones in
the current practice of process manager’s oriented on the real absenteeism of adequate measur-
able metrics and effective motivation schemas in the production and administration teams. Key
hypothesis of research methodology are based on the following knowledge:
we have a clear definition of success or failure in our company processes – there is a set of
measurable metrics oriented only on production technologies performance
there is a minimum of the most simple form of teamwork on each workplace – motivation
for improving process performance is very complicated in according to the flexibility in real
time and by specific daily conditions
each process or activity has its own manager/leader with his/her own competences and
responsibilities
The knowledge of process values and process costs can also determine a key model for the
organization and management of innovation processes, especially when striving to achieve the
desired effects of innovative plans and projects, improving manufacturing and administrative
processes. The philosophy of the model lies in the cross correlation effects of inputs and outputs
multiple business units involved in creation of a higher added value in terms of business proc
-
esses and customers.
Within the course of individual company interviews, the following question was raised: “What
do you consider as an added value in the field of analysis of your production and administration
processes from the process manager motivation point of view?” By this form of survey covered
150 medium industrial companies from Czech Republic (automotive 40% (60 companies), en-
gineering 30% (45 companies), plastic industry 20% (30 companies), chemical industry 10% (15
companies)). The answers can be summarized in the following conclusions:
a clearly defined structure of the input information in the field of process management (78%
respondents)
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the possibility of comparing partial input parameters from different departments of the
company with links to find mutual correlations between parameters with regard to the
interpretation of the output parameters related to the input parameters (88% respondents)
the possibility of making professional decisions on various alternative process solutions with
regard to knowledge of the real input and output parameters of selected processes (46%
respondents)
possible flexibility in combination with quantified variables with respect to their setting in
the processes according to predetermined parameters (65% respondents)
prompt information about the reality of enterprise processes (98% respondents)
a clear understanding of the data used in selected reports, analyses by all process managers
and employees (74% respondents)
From these partial conclusions, we have obtained the important result that the given type of
input analysis is useful for the relevant and process oriented quantification of input and output
parameters, and for defining the scope and content of structured dates which have their justifica-
tion for this type of analysis.
The preliminary analytical investigation has shown that it is necessary to link the management
of key performance indicators, productivity and efficiency with key non-financial metrics into
a single comprehensive and compact defined unit, which gives us the possibility of managing the
core processes in a flexible way, supporting processes and organisational enterprise processes as
a whole. Therefore, we focus on the fundamental orientation of production processes together
with the related administrative and management processes.
Company practice now urgently seeks an unequivocal answer to the following question: “How
can way effectively interconnect enterprise process management in the form of two mutual con-
nected schemas: a process map and organizational structure?” This is a crucial question of our
time as these are to become the models of optimization of planning, management and process
parameters improvement.
It is evident that although the company has the best organizational and process structures, on
the schema it looks perfect, the practice is different. Both schemas are totally non-functional or
have a number of procedural and organizational conflicts.
In our research methodology, we have assumed that the ideal connection is represented purely
through the relevant process structure of administrative and production processes with the key
emphasis on clear and measurable identification of process owners – core process responsible
and process competitive ones who have clearly declared their own responsibility area and rel-
evant and measurable process goals. Each process owner should have adequately defined his/her
own position regarding the right job area that is connected through the qualification and respon-
sibility matrix with other jobs in a selected production or administration process. It is absolutely
necessary to clearly define the relevant combination of process and organizational structure, the
goal of both structures according to the relevant process job definition and the goal to minimize
the potential risk of operational and strategic conflicts during the planning, organizing and re-
alization processes for better efficiency and total enterprise production performance.
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