Transparency and collective learning
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RESEARCH REPORT 33.1 Transparency and collective learning
Bernstein, E.S. (2012) The transparency paradox: A role for privacy in organizational learning and operational control, Administrative Science Quarterly, 57(2): 181-216.
Bernstein conducted two studies to challenge the assumption about the link between visibility of action and accessibility of knowledge and the value of transparency for productivity and learning.
Study 1
Study 1 was a four-week inductive qualitative study. Three researchers were embedded in the world’s second largest mobile phone factory, located in China, and simultaneously worked on assembly lines as operators and participant observers. Supervisors and fellow workers were unaware of the embeds’ true identity. During meal and toilet breaks, the embeds visited an isolated office and recorded their observations. At the end of the month, they revealed their role to their colleagues, administered a survey, and recorded interviews with several of the workers with whom they had developed good relationships.
Results
It was observed that operators hid their innovative work practices from others in order to avoid the need to explain them and to avoid getting in trouble for doing things differently. Bernstein reports that embeds were shown better ways of accomplishing tasks and a ‘ton of little tricks’ that enabled faster, easier and safer production, but they were also told that whenever customers, managers, line leaders, six sigma auditors or other ‘outsiders’ came around, they should perform the task in accordance with the posted rules. Operatives felt that it was less costly for them to hide their knowledge and learning than to share it. This hiding behavior was facilitated by the high level of visibility across the factory floor. While the factory layout had been designed to help managers and supervisors observe the way operatives were working, it also helped operatives’ spot managers and others long before they arrived.
These findings were in line with Zajonc’s observation that being observed can trigger dominant practiced responses rather than experimental, risker learning responses, and they encouraged Bernstein to investigate further the value of privacy on the factory floor.
Study 2
Study 2 was a field experiment. Two of the 16 production lines, each working two shifts per day, were randomly selected for the experimental condition and were shielded from view by the equivalent of a hospital bed curtain, leaving the remaining 14 lines as treatment controls Bernstein tracked hourly production and quality data for all the lines and collected qualitative data by embedding a participant observer in one of the experimental and one of the control lines.
Results
Performance on the lines surrounded by curtains increased by 10-15 percent. The qualitative data collected by the embeds indicated the privacy provided by the curtains contributed to the boost in performance by permitting the operatives to: 1. Tweak the line to resolve temporary problems. Bernstein refers to this as ‘productive deviance’. For example, operatives working on the control lines (no curtains) were disinclined to tweak because, if outsiders caught them, they could be blamed for causing the problem they were trying to solve, and when they did try to resolve a problem, they would carefully hide the adjustments they had made. Bernstein reports that the curtains on the experimental lines changed this dynamic significantly. Tweaking within the curtain became much transparent to other operators and these other operators could work with the tweaker to make further improvements. The embed o the experimental line also observed that, as bottlenecks arose, the workers responded as a team and moved fluidly to reduce them, and that operators, when they were not busy, switched roles so that they could learn multiple tasks, thereby improving their capability to tweak. The reduced transparency offered by the curtain permitted tweaking but it was the improved transparency inside the curtain that allowed the tweaking to be effective. 2. Experiment with new ideas that could deliver permanent improvements to the line prior to explaining them to management. The curtain made it easier for operative’s o collaborate on the development of new ideas and develop and test a prototype process without attracting the attention and interference of outsiders. 3. Avoid waste by removing the need to engage in many non-value-added hiding activities. On the curtained lines, there was less need for the look-outs to spot the approach of outsiders and, when they were spotted, for everybody to assume the less productive but officially sanctioned working practices.
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