Skills for the 21st Century Supervisor: What Factory Personnel Think

The study reported here is an attempt to fill a void in research regarding the opinions of people who actually work on the shop floor. In addition to providing historical and modern perspectives on the supervisory profession, its primary contribution is a prioritized set of 30 supervisory skills, synthesized from extant literature in the area of human performance. Factory personnel believe these skills are what are needed for leading and improving employee performance in the complex manufacturing environment of the 21st century. Using Likert-type rating scales to serve as the data collection instrument, subject groups (sorted by employees, supervisors, and managers) representing manufacturing firms in the Waterloo/Cedar Falls, Iowa, metropolitan areas were asked to rate the importance of each of the 30 skills. Three data analyses were conducted: a Pareto analysis to determine which categories and skills were most important, a comparative analysis to measure how the groups differed in their ratings, and a one-way analysis of variance F-test to determine significant differences between the mean ratings of the groups. Where significant differences were discovered, apost hoc test was also conducted to assess pairwise differences. This study was successful in identifying a Taxonomy of Supervisory Skills for improving employee performance. Although the subject groups rated all 30 skills relatively high, six specific skills were found to be most important. In the rating of nine particular skills, significant pairwise differences were discovered.