Levi’s Management Ideas to Improve Teamwork in Their Company

Levi's management ideas to improve teamwork in their company

There is a wide range of forces acting upon organisations which make the need for change inevitable. These forces of change can be summarized in five broad concepts: changing technology; knowledge explosion rapid product obsolescence; changing nature of the workforce; and quality or working life. The organization under analysis is Levi jeans manufacturer, USA, which represents one of dynamic and fast growing branches in the United States and around the world.

Levi Strauss employed so-called modular manufacturing production process which “utilizing either teams or cells - has been up and running in the U.S. sewn products industry for nearly a decade” (Abend, 1999). The aim was to operationalize values through actions designed, for example, to implement total quality and provide financial and non-finan¬cial rewards for expected behaviour, to improve productivity, to promote and reward good teamworkю Using the value set as headings for reviewing individual and team performance emphasizing that people are expected to uphold the values Levi expected to improve manufacturing system.

Research into indus¬trial psychology has changed to the examination of organization psychology, with emphasis on groups and relations between groups. The emphasis was on individual training and development, but it appeared that a broader out¬look was needed to consider the complete organization, concentrating on organizational, group and interpersonal processes, and develop plans to improve the whole system.

Innovations in Levi have been prompted precisely by the need to have a continuous workflow that the expensive technologies require, in order to be cost-effective.