Impact of technological, organizational and human resource investments on employee and manufacturing performance: Australian and New Zealand evidence

Abstract

This paper reports on the relationships between facets of integrated manufacturing - consisting of total quality management, just in time and advanced manufacturing technology - various organizational improvement initiatives (such as in leadership, teams, human resource management and benchmarking), and employee and manufacturing performance. Results from a survey of 1024 Australian and New Zealand manufacturing sites indicate that the integrated manufacturing facets of total quality management and just in time are significantly associated with organizational and human resource practices, while advanced manufacturing technology is weakly associated with a narrower range of practices. Organizational and human resource practices also explain significant additional variance in both employee and manufacturing performance, above that explained by integrated manufacturing facets. Further, by partitioning the large data set into three sections using manufacturing performance as a cutting variable, it was found that high-performing firms place considerably more emphasis on 'soft' human resource management practices and relied on total quality management principles half as much as low-performing firms. The implications of these findings for managers are then discussed.