Production technologies and workers incentives: new perspectives

Work incentive optimization has been approached by economic theory without any relation with the typical characters of a production environment in an industrial enterprise, but only assuming that wages are only related to workers productivity. The approach adopted in this paper aims to analyze the relations between production technologies and work incentives, and to refer the incentive delivering strategies to the more diffused types of production systems, either capital intensive or labour intensive. Specifically, depending on labour-based technologies or large machines automation, systems where the worker’s biological rhythm can give constraints to the machines’ mechanical rhythm, and systems where the opposite occurs will be analyzed to evaluate the effects of incentives. The goal is to prove conditions under which either work incentives should be delivered, or they could be unnecessary, and also to evaluate which type of work incentives could be the most adequate for the production system to be managed at the maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Moreover, the differences between the incentive-based remuneration of personnel employed in the enterprise management department and of workers employed in the production lines will be studied, thus clarifying how incentives could be made different according to the specific duties of workers