중소기업의 노동력 민첩성과 조직성과

Abstract

The industrial environment has changed radically over the last some decades, with technology, market conditions and customer requirements changing at an unprecedented speed and in directions that have been difficult to foresee. Related this issues, the problem of how organizations can successfully deal with unpredictable, dynamic, and constantly changing environments has been a prevailing topic both in industry and academia for a few decades. Against these new competitive conditions, many firms have started re-orienting their distinctive competencies, adopting different practices and tools to improve their competitiveness such as automation and flexible manufacturing systems, concurrent engineering, total quality management. Recently research on how organizations cope with uncertainty and change are focused term of agility. The notion of the agile workforce has been discussed as central to creating the agile organization, which achieves superior environmental responsiveness in contexts of turbulence and change. Previous agility research has focused overly on the organization, paying scant attention to the workforce. The purpose of the paper is three fold. Firstly, this paper reviews the concept, attributes, frameworks, and approaches of workforce agility based on existing academic literature, and suggest how workforce agility approaches can be evolved from related terms such as flexibility and adaptivity. Also, there is summarized the researches on the relationship between workforce agility and firm’s performance. Secondly, this paper studies empirically to examine how the workforce agility impact upon the firm’s performance in small and mid enterprises. Finally, this paper suggests some implications and enhancing practices of workforce agility for firm’s performance. In a changing business environment, the agile workforce faces uncertainty and is expected to provide fast response to unexpected events. An agile workforce is also expected to effectively take part in any collaborative environment whether it cross-functional project team, collaborative ventures with other companies, or a virtual organization. The employed workforce in an AM environment utilizes flexible technologies and infrastructure that supports change and requires higher cognitive demands. In order to provide suggestions concerning improvements in controls and equipments, the operator has to be familiar with the equipment technology. This in turn will require acquisition of new knowledge, accelerated learning, and JIT delivery of training. The information, communication, and mobile technologies from one hand will support and enhance the workforce ability for speedy action and operational flexibility, but from other it also increases the cognitive demands and the time pressure. The concept of agility, which was originated in manufacturing research by the Iaccoca Institute, soon became a focal reference for manufacturing systems studies. Organizational agility has been defined as the successful exploitation of competitive bases (speed, flexibility, innovation proactivity, quality and profitability) through the integration of reconfigurable resources and best practices in a knowledge-rich environment to provide customer-driven products and services in a fast changing market environment. At the heart of the agility concept are the notions of adaptability and flexibility. For organizations to adapt speedily and to respond flexibly, they need to deploy new technology and IS, capitalize on knowledgeable and empowered employees, integrate business processes, adopt virtual forms of organization, cooperate internally and externally, achieve mass customization of products and services and integrate the supply chain. To approach the concept of workforce agility requires understanding adaptive organization and flexible organization. The idea of adaptive organization has originated from the contingency approach in organizational research which is based on the main premise that organizational effectiveness can be achieved by fitting the characteristics of the organization to contingencies that reflect the situation of the organization. In order to maintain effectiveness, the organizations have to adapt over time to fit changing contingencies. The environment, organizational size, and organizational strategy are considered as main contingencies that shape the organization. Organizational flexibility is considered as the organization’s ability to adjust it’s internal structures and processes in response to changes in the environment. Several different taxonomies of the organizational flexibility have been proposed in the literature. The most commonly used taxonomy distinguishes numerical, functional, and financial flexibility. The prevailing body of research on organizational flexibility was focused on the investigation of the numerical and financial aspects of flexibility and labor market flexibility. The reviewed theories and research suggest that flexible and adaptive organizations are characterized by clarity of purpose and low levels of formal regulation in respect to job description, work schedules, and overall organizational policies. These organizations have fewer power differentials design best fit stable environments with low rates of change. In such environments, the high-level management possesses the appropriate amount of knowledge to make decisions and organize the work. Agile manufacturing has been positioned main stream among the literatures on workforce agility and, most of the literature on agile manufacturing discusses only strategies and techniques. Few papers address the conceptualization and development of an integrated view of the agile enterprise concept. However, several agile manufacturing frameworks based on the different definitions and approaches can be found in the literature. The review of some agile manufacturing frameworks was made below in order to identify main elements and attributes of agile enterprise. In the past, it was believed that agility and responsiveness of flexibility strategy can be achieved through sophisticated technologies such as computer-integrated manufacturing. However, recent research findings showed that manufacturing flexibility depends much more on people than on technologies. In other words, the demands of AM also led to a conclusion that agility cannot be achieved without leveraging of employee’s knowledge and skills that related closely workforce agility. It is widely believed that workforce agility may provide wide range of benefits such as quality improvement, better customer service, learning curve acceleration, economy of scope and depth. This paper designs five hypotheses that workforce agility attributes constructed intelligence, competencies, collaboration, culture, IS suggested from Breu et. al.(2002) impact on firm’s performance such as sales volumes, market share, profit. Intelligence included that responsiveness to changing customer needs and responsiveness to changing market conditions. Competencies included speed of developing new skills and competencies, speed of acquiring the skills necessary for business process change, speed of innovating management skills, speed of acquiring new skills. Collaboration included effectiveness of cooperating across functional boundaries and ease of moving between the projects. Culture means Employee empowerment for independent decision making, and IS is support of the IT infrastructure for the rapid introduction of new IS. To test hypotheses empirically, the data was gathered from 583 SMEs located on 35 Industrial Complex in Korea. The results of analysis as follows: First, intelligence, competencies, IS has significant positive impact on the firm’s performance, but not significant collaboration and culture. Second, competencies constructed speed of acquiring new skills and speed of innovating management skills has the highest effect on the firm’s performance. The results of this paper suggest some implication that to enhance firm’s performance through workforce agility need to powerful leadership of CEO about focus on learning and training employee to promote and change for proactivity, adaptability, and resiliency competencies as workforce enhancing behavior strategy.