Lincoln Electric Case Study

The Lincoln Electric Company started in 1906 by James F. Lincoln in Cleveland, Ohio. His father was a minister and so in turn you can see many Christ like principals at the center of Lincolns Electric Company. James’s Golden Rule was taken from the Sermon on the Mount: Do unto others as you would have then do unto you. Through this philosophy stems many of Mr. Lincoln’s main ideas for his company such as: The Incentive Management plan, the way people communicate within the company, the bonus plan and even down to the management style. One of the first things that James did when his company began to grow was to ask his employees to elect representatives to be a part of an Advisory board. The Advisory board would meet two times a month with

He sold shares to all his employees at book price. James figured that if his employees could see the rise and fall of stock prices they would also see the importance in their productivity. Mr. Lincoln came up with several ways to evaluate his workers performance one way was through Piece work and another way was through Merit cards. Employees that worked in the factories were mainly in charge of assembling parts piece by piece, in order to ensure that his workers were working as productively as possible he came up with a system for evaluating them. He would evaluate the time it took to make a particular piece, how difficult it was to assemble that piece and how much that piece sold for. With this formula he would base how

If you have been working for Lincoln for at least three years you have total job security, guaranteeing at least 30 hours of work each week. The only excuse for being laid off would be misconduct. Now if things are going slow for the company and they need to place you in another area of the company you have to accept that. Due to this No Lay-off policy the turnover rate for employees is virtually nonexistent. There are many perks for working at the Lincoln Company they provided a company medical plan, retirement program and even a cafeteria in the facility that served meals at 60 percent then they would elsewhere