The Lincoln Electric Company

The Lincoln Electric Company is an atypical example of American manufacturing. It has managed to thrive in the face of an industry that has all but evaporated from United States’ shores over the course of the last twenty-five years. Their unique culture is the cornerstone of their uninhibited success. James E. Lincoln was a pioneer in novel managerial techniques that lead him and his brother’s company into prosperity. The corporate culture of the Lincoln Electric Company is based upon his values because they remain relevant to the company’s success even till this day. Through an employee-appointed advisement committee to principle management, he showed mutual respect for the importance of each employee and considered them …show more content…
The system for which bonuses are derived directly correlates to their merit pay plan. As mentioned prior, employees are evaluated on several metrics on a bi-annual basis which are used to calculate the percentage of their bonus through the merit system. This percentage is then applied against the determined standard bonus for that year to calculate the employee’s take away. Since output is only one portion of the areas reviewed, this encourages a competitive culture without compromising ethical integrity or production quality. In addition, it challenges employees to get engaged in helping better the organization. The innovation of employee-driven cost saving measures is not only passed on to the customers and stockholders, but to the workers as well. At the time of this analysis’ publication, the average incentive bonus had averaged the gross salary of an employee and had consistently maintained that way since the midpoint of the Great …show more content…
At its core it is authoritarian by self-proclamation, however, in practice it can appear hands-off and at times even liassez-faire. The worker to manager ratio can be as high as one to one-hundred, making micromanagement statistically impossible. Since every aspect of the culture encourages efficiencies, lest they be to the customer’s detriment, workers operate multiple machines simultaneously to create significant pieces of the finished product unsupervised. Management has a similarly diverse set of duties to perform, time for employee oversight is rarely allotted. All potential new hires are screened by human resources and an executive committee prior to giving a direct report manager the final ruling. Another distinctive aspect of the managerial hierarchy at Lincoln is the lack of a formal organizational chart. This allows for a dynamically fluid approach to leveraging the best resource to attack a problem. Upper-level management is able to keep their finger on the pulse of day to day operations by never permitting greater than two to three layers of management between the lowest-level employee and the