The Golden Style Of The Lincoln Electric Company

Besides, managers in Lincoln Electric Company were not high in the sky, they worked and lived with workers in daily life, they had free atmosphere at work and they strengthened the feeling that workers were managing themselves.

Lincoln electric’s approach to management contributes to its employee’s high motivational rate. According to (Draft, 2010), Lincoln electric motivates it’s staff with “strict performance goals to achieve pay, precisely defined task and a powerful incentive control program which is based on a piece-rate bases and merit-pay which is based on performance”(p.562). Other motivating factors are annual bonuses and stock purchase plans which all employees are offered (Draft, 2010). Another contribution to its success is their organizational culture which is “based on openness, trust, shared control and an egalitarian spirit” (p. 562-563).

After analyzing the story of Lincoln Electric Company I’ve come to the Conclusion that their organizational culture they practicing is People-oriented culture. Because the company values fairness, supportiveness and they respect individual rights. There is a greater emphasis on expectation of treating people with respect and dignity.

Lincoln Electric is one of the leading producers and manufacturers of Arc Welding Products and Electric Motors. Lincoln Electric’s success lies on the foundation of the various company policies introduced by James Lincoln. This case study analyzed the critical points on which the success of Lincoln Electric’s has its foundations.

Elements of Lincoln Electric’s management system that made it so popular in the U.S. such as piece-rate work, bonuses, and

In this case analysis I will be analyzing and summarizing my understanding of the organizational culture of the Lincoln Electric Company, based on key pointers and a Harvard Case Study by Arthur Sharplin. In my analysis I will be using the framework from chapter eight of the textbook “Principles of Management” by Carpenter, Bauer and Erdogan to discern aspects of the company’s culture. The company is said to have a distinctive management culture and manufactures welding equipment. It is located near Cleveland, Ohio USA. Lincoln Electric Company is considered to be one of the best managed manufacturing companies in the world.

The founders of the Lincoln Electric Company left a legacy of an organization culture that promotes high productivity through sound management policies which have stood the test of time. The exponential growth of the company after the death of James F. Lincoln was a direct result of the establishment of a rich culture mix based on values that were widely shared and accepted by the members of the organization. Management empowered employees to become part of the decision making process through the contribution of ideas through the Advisory Board which was elected by the employees from amongst themselves. Reward management systems and all the other artifacts of the Lincoln Electric’s distinguished strong organizational culture will be analyzed in greater detail in this essay.

Over the decades and since it was first created, the ongoing guidance and encouragement of the management towards their employees made Lincoln’s expansion possible to a global level. The ideas and philosophy of the founders are still at the core of the organizational culture because they strongly supported the company in its initial stages and helped distinguish it from others. “Thus, by providing a competitive advantage, these values were retained as part of the corporate culture and were taught to new members as the right way to do business.”

Lincoln Electric was founded at the end of the 19-th century by John C. Lincoln. He was a talented engineer who invested 200 dollars in his product electrical motors. Soon he was replaced by his younger brother James F. Lincoln, and the founder of Lincoln Electric dedicated his time to engineering activities and inventions. James F. Lincoln was a different type of inventor. He was a good manager with the nice strategic point of view over manufacturing. At the beginning of the 20th century, the company started manufacturing welding machines which become their iconic product. That is not the only thing Lincoln electric became famous for. The incentive management plan was one of a kind at that time and was the first step of creating company culture with a high focus on the employees, something unheard among the other manufacturers at that time of the century. Both Lincoln brothers were inventors and this was crucial for the earlier company development. Both were pioneers and the vision and the mission that was integrated especially from James Lincoln played a major role in the dramatic company development during the World War II.

The Lincoln Electric Company has dominated the market of welding machine manufacturing since its infancy in the late 1900’s. Their continued success is due to companies’ ability to adapt different organizational cultures, into a beautiful melting pot of profitability. Management could be described as a mix of both outcome-oriented and stable styles, with a hefty dose of people-oriented cultures, all wrapped into one.

LE has built a reputation on the principle of faith in the individual. This philosophy is an fundamental part the management style at Lincoln Electric. They substantially reward competition and teamwork in its workforce to enforce the principle of faith. With wage are being calculated on the basis of production output \not on fixed wages over time. The number of pieces that an employee is able to finish will determine how much the company pays in an annual bonus (O’Connell, 1998).

Lincoln Electric was founded by John C. Lincoln, an engineer and inventor, and was then managed later by his brother, James F. Lincoln, starting in 1907. James applied his christian principles to business management and how the company would be run as a whole. The core of these business practices revolved around honesty and service to the customer and employee. The assumption that he had about his employees was that they required a steady income just as much as the business did, and that the employee and manager should work as a team to be most effective. The employee does not wish to support shoddy work, just as management does not want to pay for shoddy work, and that customers want the best possible value. This translated into the mindset that customer satisfaction is the top priority, employee satisfaction is the second priority, and that stockholders are the third priority.

Lincoln Electric is a textbook example of what is referred to as a people-oriented culture. A people-oriented culture is a culture that values fairness, supportiveness, and respecting individual rights. (Principles of Management, 2016) There are many examples of this people-oriented culture. One example of the people-oriented culture is that the company didn’t carpet the president’s office. It might seem like a small gesture but it reinforces the idea of fairness. To continue on the fairness idea, the company only allowed in house training. Since not all employees could take advantage of off site training, they decided that nobody could go. Furthermore, executives

The Lincoln Electric Company Since 1895, located in Cleveland, Ohio, the Lincoln Electric Company “ the world’s largest manufacture of welding machines and electrodes” was able to create the ideal organization throughout several aspects of the company’s culture. Its founders, first John C Lincoln and James Lincoln, who later joined the company as the General Manager, had one duty to get done; to ask his employees to elect a committee that would give him advice in regards to the company’s operations. Since then, an organization structure was performed. Lincoln Electric Company separated itself from the competitors for its innovative policies.

AurtherSharplin wrote a case study on Lincoln Electric Company [1]back in 1989 to document their success and what led to it. The company was very successful at the time of this study and it is a well written document. The case study finds many factors for the success of the company which appears to have a truly altruistic approach to business. In my case analysis I will not only look at the positive and negative attributes of the company, but I will also look at modern available data to see how well has the company faired and compare corporate policy changes. Meeting with a company and discussing with its leadership its success is not the only factor which should be considered now that we have an additional 24 years’ worth of data. The