olly-supported company pension plan within the United States. Xerox Corporation is also known for a paternalistic system of benefits; however, social responsibility is stressed and higher level personnel are expected to manifest a sense of social responsibility through community activities. Kaiser Steel has adopted the Scanlon Plan in order to implement "reasonable sharing of productivity and labor cost savings coupled with stability of employment or income to assure progress for the Company, the employees, and the public interest." Thus, this company emphasized employee productivity and provides incentives for this.
Procedures: The actual implementation of personnel action differs within each company. Standard, however, are such practices as employee evaluation of performance, standards of discipline, usually involving a process of oral, then written notification; appeals and grievance procedures, merit increases, etc. In general, as much effort as possible is made to ensure that the personnel function operate impartially and efficiently, threading a path between the welfare of the employees and the needs of management.
Design-Making: With the increase in size and complexity of the major U.S. corporations, efforts have been made to decentralize the decision-making process as far down as possible in order to implement management by exception. In doing this, efforts have been made to introduce collaborative forms of leadership, because:
if we push decision making down in an organization
as far as we possibly can, we tend to get better
decisions, people tend to grow and to develop more
rapidly, and they are motivated more effectively.
Most forms of collaborative decision-making stem from the philosophy of Joe Scanlon, who advocated: "broad decentralization and genuine delegation, clear to the bottom of the organization." Companies have found that encouraging collaborative decision-making reduce...