A new approach in analysing social-technical roles at Toyota: the team leader Online publication date: Mon, 18-Oct-2010
by Phillip W. Marksberry
International Journal of Human Resources Development and Management (IJHRDM), Vol. 10, No. 4, 2010
Abstract: Many companies have attempted to imitate and copy Toyota's team leader position in the implementation of lean manufacturing. Unfortunately, most observations of this role fail to quantify and accurately represent how this role is designed and integrated into Toyota's complicated lean production system. This work combines classical role theory and latent semantic analysis (LSA) in the study and classification of the team leader role. The findings of this work are that the team leader role shares many of the rights and obligations of that of the group leader. This new insight and others, provide an increased understanding of the training and development needs of the team leader role in social-technical environments. Lastly, this mathematical analysis can be used to visualise many unique role features and components of a role that has traditionally been unidentified using observation and interviewing techniques.
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