High levels of managerial turnover can disrupt organizational functioning at the best of times (Kitchen, 1992, p. 1). During the contemporary period of economic transition·regional economic unification, corporate restructuring, governmental retrenchment, and so forth·such turnover poses even greater risk for the organization. A research study was conducted to investigate the problem of turnover among first-line supervisors in a manufacturing setting.
The purpose of this study was to identify human resource strategies that will enable manufacturing organizations to improve retention rates of first-line supervisors. Major causes of turnover among first-level supervisors were identified in the pursuit of this objective.
The research setting for this study was a manufacturing organization. Specifically, the setting was an assembly plant of the Ford Motor Company.
The organizational sub-unit that provided the focus for this study employed 65 first-line supervisors in a three-shift production operation. The rate of turnover among these first-line supervisors had been at undesirably high levels for the past three years. There were no signs indicating that the situation was likely to improve in the foreseeable future in the absence of effective action by senior management at the plant. Management within the target organizational sub-unit had not applied consistent human resource policy in relation to the first-level supervisors, and this practice likely had exacerbated job satisfaction problems among the first-level supervisors. Senior management at the plant considered the improvement of the retention rate among first-level supervisors to be a priority objective. Based on this problem, the research objectives that were sought through the conduct of this study were pursued through the development of answers to three research questions, as follows:
1. What is the level of job satisfaction/job dissatisfaction among the ...