Management attitudes towards gainsharing as a strategic tool for productivity improvement at a selected South African company

Abstract

There is a lack of commitment and participation in productivity initiatives at shop floor level in South Africa and companies are faced with competitive challenges of promoting innovativeness relating to productivity improvement amongst employees. South Africa’s labour productivity in the manufacturing sector is low when compared to Korea, United States of America, Taiwan, Japan, France and the United Kingdom.

It has increasingly been recognised in industry that by introducing a carefully crafted incentive scheme, it may be possible to induce South African workers to work both harder and smarter and use existing technologies in new and better ways that enhance their productivity. The study proposes to evaluate to what extent gainsharing can be a solution.