Understanding leadershipDecember 4, 2015

Understanding leadership – Part 12: Grasp the principle of division of labour!

The term "division of labour" barely appears in today's Work 4.0 debates—it seems antiquated, belonging to the steam age. When machines "talk" to each other in the internet-of-things era, where are people and how do they work and communicate? In industry announcements, people barely feature alongside IT, robotics, sensors, 3D printers, clouds and big data. "Individualisation" is the sign of the times, says the labour minister, seeking balance between company flexibility and employee needs. That is not easy: how much time sovereignty will our company grant when customers order individual products just in time? When technical systems "cooperate" ever more closely, how is human work organised? Can we still oversee or steer production and work processes? Do we still have a plan of what actually happens? Work 4.0 organisation is in principle designable—but limits set by system functionality grow tighter with complexity. Where Taylor used work instructions, software routines now norm human intervention. Software shapes work. To co-design, we need basic principles of work organisation. The core is division of labour, which I explore here in its origins:

The principle of division of labour

Division of labour happens in two stages:

The work process is broken into individual steps.
Partial tasks are assigned to different people who thereafter perform only that partial task.

Depending on scope and who performs partial tasks, different forms can be distinguished.

Division of labour schema © professore.de

Thus craft division of labour arose organically from specialisation in trades; town–country division from societal differentiation; gender-specific division as cultural and historical.

Factory work and industrial division of labour

Industrial division of labour arose with factory work—splitting work into tasks within a process, turning workers into "detail workers" (cf. Braverman 1985, pp. 63 ff.). Two categories:

Horizontal division — Fordism, assembly line.
Vertical division — Taylorism, separation of manual and mental work.

Horizontal division of labour

Characterised by breaking processes into smallest steps—beyond functional and occupational division. Steps are split so workers specialise in segments, creating unskilled repetitive partial tasks. Its technological synonym is the assembly line.

Babbage described the economic advantage of wage differentiation through splitting work into smallest steps:

"…any attempt to explain low factory prices as a result of division of labour would be incomplete without noting that the industrial entrepreneur, by splitting tasks each requiring different skill or strength, can buy exactly the amount needed for each task; whereas if one worker did all the work, they would need enough skill for the hardest and enough strength for the most strenuous part." (Babbage 1833, p. 175, cited in Braverman 1985, p. 70)

Vertical division of labour

Marked by separating planning and execution, shifting work knowledge from worker to management, which plans all steps and controls execution. Its organisational synonym is Taylorism.

Mechanics at Tabor Co., a Taylor showcase firm c. 1905

Taylorism rests on separation of manual and mental work. Taylor on vertical division:

"It falls to managers to gather knowledge once held only by individual workers, classify it in tables, form rules and formulas to help the worker in daily work." (Taylor 1983 (1919 reprint), p. 33) "All mental work under the old system was done by the worker from personal experience. Under the new system it must be done by management according to scientific laws. (...) Clearly a different man is needed for mental work and another for manual work." (Taylor 1983 (1919 reprint), p. 40) "Only by compulsory introduction of uniform methods, best tools and conditions, and compulsory cooperation of management and workers can faster pace be secured—and that can only be management's task." (Taylor 1983 (1919 reprint), pp. 86 f.)

Introducing a major IT system today involves long, complex, sometimes conflictual redesign of work organisation. As-is processes are captured and to-be processes modelled for seamless system function. Change management often means new job descriptions. Those who still want to co-design hit "system boundaries" quickly. But do we still want to co-design? Perhaps everything is already optimally regulated in technical systems? In Work 4.0, are we still in control?

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