USAGE OF PROCEDURES AND CONTROLS IN INNOVATIVE MANUFACTURING COMPANIES

Innovativeness is viewed as an organizational environment where ideas are freely generated and shared and where experimentation is encouraged. Systems used to plan and control operations may affect innovativeness because goals held constant during a planning and control period may retard innovation, and because tight budgeting procedures may curtail experimentation. An instrument was designed to include six demographic variables, thirteen items for surveying practice and procedure usage and thirty-five items having a five-point agree-disagree scale. Innovativeness was gauged from responses to ten agree-disagree items. Respondents were line production managers from foremen to heads of manufacturing. Nine surveyed firms manufacturing furniture or machinery were ranked by innovativeness to form three groups. Comparing responses of most-innovative firms with those of least-innovative firms strongly suggests that planning and control procedures are differently applied with respect to innovativeness. A larger sample should be utilized to more definitely identify these relationships. Variables are also compared with respect to managerial rank to show how planning and control procedures vary at different levels of management