Abstract—Although major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors such as machine order/layout, family part grouping, workflow sequence, etc., it has been found that for successful implementation of cell production systems, some human issues should be treated seriously. One of these issues is that productivity of production cells depend largely on workers and therefore it is important to consider how to measure workers’ aptitude and investigate how workers’ aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. In this paper, we make an experimental study to identify factors influencing workers’ aptitude toward assembly tasks and productivity in production cells. Our study is different from researches reported so far in that we carry out a laboratory experiment of cell production to measure the productivity of the workers in production cells. Meanwhile we designed a self-evaluation sheet to measure the workers’ aptitude from three viewpoints: growth-need strength, self-efficacy and core self-evaluation. It was clarified that only one factor: growth-need strength has significant relations to productivity of the production cells, and there are some issues to be dealt further.

Index Terms—cell production, cellular manufacturing, growth-need strength, self-efficacy, workers’ aptitude

Cite: Yanwen Dong, "Identifying Factors Reflecting Workers’ Aptitude toward Assembly Tasks in Production Cells" Journal of Advanced Management Science, Vol. 5, No. 3, pp. 201-204, May 2017. doi: 10.18178/joams.5.3.201-204