19750: Aligning TPM and Contingent Worker Policies: Approaches for Empowerment and Skill Enhancement (session 25563)

The growing reliance on contingent workers in modern organizations raises important questions about the effectiveness of this staffing approach. Through a socio-technical theory lens, we investigate how operational practices, particularly total productive maintenance (TPM), can address these concerns. In this work, we examine the value of these practices in interactions with, and potentially in place of, common human resource emphasis on high-performance work practices (HPWP) for contingent workers. Our study draws on data from 76 Portuguese manufacturing firms, combining matched-sample surveys of operations managers and human resource managers, supplemented by financial data from Informa D\&B and Informação Empresarial Simplificada. This multi-source approach allows us to analyze how different combinations of TPM and HPWP affect firm financial performance. We further conduct 14 post-hoc semi-structured interviews with operations and human resource managers from the firms in our dataset to contextualize and clarify the nuances in our findings. The results reveal that when autonomous TPM investment is low, there are observable financial benefits from investments in broad HPWP skill development for contingent workers. In such low TPM settings, efforts to enhance worker empowerment demonstrate negative financial returns. However, under high autonomous TPM conditions, contingent worker empowerment exhibits a significant positive relationship with financial performance. In such high TPM settings, supplemental investments in broader HPWP skill development fail to yield additional value. These findings suggest that the effectiveness of skill enhancement and empowerment initiatives for contingent workers depends critically on the TPM context. The implications for coordinated operations and human resource planning in the use of contingent workers are discussed.

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