Teams, continuous improvement, the unions and conditional trust in the company Scania

• In this paper, it will be discussed if there is a “team dimension” connected to legitimacy/trust in manufacturing companies. The “improvement teams” in the truck producing company Scania, that also are the basic organisational unit in production, can be described as “open micro systems”, with external relations and links between the teams and the organisation as a whole (Sederblad, 2011b). Our interpretation is that the result of continuous improvement activities in the improvement teams is dependent on blue collar workers believe that they will, at least indirectly and in a long time perspective, benefit from involvement in developing the production system. We will introduce the concept “conditional trust” to analyse the relations in production (Sederblad, 2011a; see also page 5 in this paper). This concept will also be used to understand the negotiation system on the company level and we will especially focus on the role of the unions. In the final section of the paper we will analyse how the production system and negotiation system are linked to each other. We will discuss and analyse the following questions: 1. How is the “improvement teams” organised in the company Scania and how do they work with “continuous improvement”? 2. How is conditional trust established in production and in improvement activities (among supervisors, team-leaders and workers)? 3. How is conditional trust established in the negotiations in the company (management, unions and workers)? 4. How is trust in production linked to trust in the negotiation system, and how functions the system at the workplace as a whole?

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