ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with one large enterprise and the changes that have taken place there. However, this enterprise is not unique in its participative approach to organizational development and greenfield site design. New, decentralized, flexible, cross-disciplinary forms of work organization are spreading quite rapidly in some industrial sectors. So the ‘empowerment’ necessary to make decentralized, more flexible forms of work organization operate to the advantage of the employees is frequently missing, certainly in the USA. For a number of reasons the offshore petroleum industry has itself become quite bureaucratic, and more so than comparable industries onshore. The board of directors instructed top management to explore the factors that lay behind this result and to propose a plan to improve the situation, Rebuilding Co-operation and Trust. A few managers used the works council actively for joint consultation, but most tended to see the meetings as necessary rituals and put little time or effort into them.
