Incentivizing Work and the Division of Labor
- Connor Morris
- Aug 22
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 hours ago
By Connor Morris
August 22, 2026
In modern manufacturing, one of the biggest concerns continues to be the wellbeing, engagement, and retention of workers. From my own experience in automotive manufacturing, one of the biggest influencers behind low morale, poor mental health, and substandard performance stems from the nature of the work performed on an assembly line. Aside from the physical aspect of the job, the psychological impact of repetitive work of this nature can be damaging to employee morale and motivation. There are several perspectives to view this problem. From a Human Resource Management perspective, it is important to understand the concerns employees have regarding the nature of work in manufacturing in order to improve morale, performance, and retention. From a continuous improvement perspective, all members of your workforce should feel capable and confident to participate in identifying constraints and implementing solutions beyond the simple repetitive tasks they are assigned to perform. Without this level of engagement, workers will be unable to further contribute to the success of the organization and will likely further deviate themselves from the goals of the organization. To better understand this, it is important to first understand the evolution of modern manufacturing and how the Division of Labor has impacted the nature of work.
No invention has impacted the scale and success of modern manufacturing more than the Division of Labor. Outlined in, “The Wealth of Nations”, eighteenth century Scottish economist, Adam Smith, argued that factories could reap the greatest output from their workers by dividing the steps within a process into simple, separate repetitive tasks. His most famous example of this concept is the pin factory. In this example, Smith illustrates the difference in output between a single artisan craftsman producing a pin and a factory of workers. Whereas a single craftsman may spend a single day straightening, cutting, and sharpening only a handful of pins, a pin factory with each step divided among different workers could produce thousands of pins in a single day. And whereas the artisan craftsman was an expert in every part of the process to produce a pin, each worker in the pin factory was an expert only within their specific step. This simplification of work led to the widespread creation of an unskilled labor class in early industrial Britain.
Though published in 1776, Smith’s concept of the Division of Labor has had far reaching influence on the present day. In the United States, perhaps the most famous modern application of the Division of Labor comes from Henry Ford’s assembly line. What was once an expensive novelty that took a considerable amount of time to create, Henry Ford was able to produce a single automobile every ninety minutes with a moving assembly line bringing each step of the process to a single worker. Similar to the pin factory example, each worker became an expert only in the single, repetitive task that they were responsible for.
There are many benefits to the Division of Labor; these include greater efficiency, standardization, higher profits, and lower consumer costs. However, a considerable disadvantage to the Division of Labor has been its effect on the workers themselves. As Smith illustrated in, “The Wealth of Nations”, artisan craftsmen slowly became usurped by unskilled workers that could produce the same product at a greater rate and lower cost. In Great Britain, Smith observed that artisan craftsmen soon began competing for work with the unskilled workforce created by the Division of Labor. The same can be seen in the United States in the years following the Civil War. With the rapid industrialization and mechanization of Gilded Age America, much of the labor in the United States shifted from artisan craftsmen to unskilled workers.
Aside from the slew of other hardships unskilled workers faced in the United States, such as low wages, long hours, and unsafe working conditions, they also had to contend with the monotonous and repetitive nature of modern factories. Artisan craftsmanship was previously the primary mode of production in Europe and the United States prior to industrialization. They included skills that were commonly passed down by generation and took a lifetime to learn and master. As discuss by Smith in, “The Wealth of Nations”, occupations such as blacksmiths and weavers were slowly replaced by the mass production of similar products. Early examples of this in the United States can be seen in the 1790s where the rise of textile mills in New England caused many artisan weavers to seek employment as wage labors in factories in order to compete for work.
The increase in wage labor in the West influenced many new ideas towards the effects of rapid industrialization. One of the most important critics to emerge during this time was Karl Marx, who argued that the industrialization seen in Europe reduced the worker to a machine and a “working animal”. Despite Marx’s outright rejection of Adam Smith’s philosophy and support for the Division of Labor, both Marx and Smith seem to agree on the idea that the Division of Labor and the simplification of tasks come at a detriment to the worker. Like Marx’s idea of a “working animal”, Smith makes a similar observation (albeit less cynical) that the Division of Labor makes workers “ignorant and stupid” in that they are not given any capacity to think and innovate beyond their assigned steps within the process.
By the turn of the twentieth century, modern manufacturing in the United States remained dominated largely by the ideas of the Division of Labor. However, by the 1930s, new ideas regarding effective management emerged from the Hawthorne Works plant in Cicero, Illinois. Between 1924 and 1932, researchers were tasked to study and improve productivity among workers at the Hawthorne plant and discovered that increased positive social interaction among employees and supervisors played a large role in improving employee morale and productivity. The findings from the Hawthorne Studies directly opposed those of Frederick Taylor’s “Scientific Management”, which had previously said that workers were motivated solely by wages and that greater productivity was only achieved by maximizing the efficiency of physical motion and minimizing takt time.
Today, the level of social engagement encouraged by the Hawthorne Studies continues to be a driving force behind modern managerial technique. Within the last decade, organizational psychologist Arnold Bakker put forth the concept of “job crafting”, which are the proactive steps employees themselves can take to improve the nature of their work and find greater fulfillment and engagement. Generally speaking, job crafting encourages employees to change their working environment in both physical and psychological aspects to get the most out of their work. In many white-collar professions, this level of freedom and flexibility can be very achievable. However, in blue-collar positions, this level of flexibility can be very limited. This is especially apparent in manufacturing where many workers are restricted to a single physical space and a set takt time. However, job crafting can be easily translated to manufacturing workers by encouraging them to leverage their surrounding resources in order to grow professionally and seek greater fulfillment. In manufacturing, this is often seen in mentoring programs, job rotations, voluntary training opportunities, and certifications. A 2011 job crafting study conducted by Demerouti and colleagues found positive improvement in both access to supervisor support and developmental opportunities. In a manufacturing environment, this level of support available to workers is critical for morale and can encourage employees to grow beyond their current roles and seek new ways to innovate and participate in continuous improvement initiatives.
Contrary to the verbiage used by both Karl Marx and Adam Smith, a worker is neither an “animal” nor are they “ignorant." Quite the opposite. Every assembly line worker and operator are the experts of their role and are crucial to sustaining continuous success and innovation. The question for management is how to best leverage the abilities of their workforce to achieve these ends. As we have seen throughout the history of modern manufacturing, while the Division of Labor has been widely successful for both industrial and social growth, it can only be sustainable over time by maintaining the integrity and potential of each employee.
References:
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. Modern Library, 1994.
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