Flexibilidad Funcional y Flexibilidad Financiera en las Empresas Medianas y Grandes del Sector Metal en Cataluña

Abstract

This paper summarizes the theoretical characteristics of the types functional flexibility and wage flexibility. In the empirical part we check for a sample of companies in the Catalonia metal sector with at least 100 employees, if several modalities about functional flexibility are implemented. Mainly the job rotation, autonomy over work, and delegate indirect tasks to the operator. In addition also the modalities of variable pay for the operator. The individual and joint application of the items is analyzed, making a descriptive statistical analysis and bivariate association. In most companies operators are intensively responsibles for the order and clean their workplace, as well as self control, followed by prepares the machine, to search the origin of defects and their solution. Almost half firms haven't incorporated teamwork, while cross functional teams and improvements teams are more incorporated, although the proportion that applies a high degree is low. The operator does not usually engage in maintenance of machinery nor collaborate in the development and improvement of the standard. There are limited autonomy in work organization and planification, fixing work methods and rhythm of work. The wage flexibility is low, although the pay for performance/productivity is the modality most used. The pairs of modalities of wages that are significantly are the incentives: "to fulfll team goals" and "quality", "profit sharing" and "knowledge/skills/abilities". Moreover it is tested whether there are significant differences according to central tendency of various items (rhythm of work, stress level, absenteeism level as well as the ratios: percentage of variable pay, labor productivity, ROS, and personnel costs/revenues) segmented according to the modality functional flexibility or wage flexibility considered. The main conclusions are that rhythms of work and absenteeism are lower when job rotation is reduced, there aren't significant differences in productivity, but there are differences in central tendency measures of the profit margin when segmenting by the items: autonomy in work organization and planification, rhythm of work, self control, order and clean, and operator maintenance of machinery. The value of this ratio is lower when such items are reduced. Few companies incorporated most labor practices intensely. Therefore, most firms require greater joint incorporation of labor flexibility dimensions to achieve complementarities and synergies. Homals analysis is used to establish relationships between more than two qualitative variables and reduce the dimensionality by incorporating measures of discrimination. The first dimension includes mainly: the operator is responsible of seeks the origin of defects, to solve the defects found, to program the machine, the basic maintenance of the machine and analyzed data. The second dimension includes: teamwork in the production area, teams improvement voluntary, the operator involvement in continous improvement and cross teams to solve problems. We identify a typology of firms, using cluster analysis with the results of Homals. No significant differences were obtained when segmented by the 10 groups offered by the cluster.