¶ … productivity and the decrease in controllable rejects? It may be that the workers were given more autonomy now and they felt more creative and in charge of decisions that they may wish to effectuate.

This coheres with Maslow's model of motivation where he ranks creativity as the highest hierarchy on the pyramid. Workers are not only motivated by money. Many individuals are motivated as much and sometimes even more by acknowledgment, recognition, and their higher needs being met.

Previously, workers had to cohere to an "assembly line [that] had been carefully balanced by industrial engineers, who had used a time and motion study to break the job down into subassembly tasks, each requiring about three minutes to accomplish. The amount of time calculated for each subassembly had also been "balanced" so that the task performed by each worker was supposed to take almost exactly the same amount of time. The workers were paid a straight hourly rate. " Now the workers built the hotplates individually tasking their creativity and stimulating them. No wonder,...

As one person put it, "Now, this is my hotplate."
2. What might account for the drop in absenteeism and the increase in moral?

Before, workers may likely have felt robots stultified by a demanding system that threatened their autonomy and sense of individuality. employees may feel their autonomy threatened in that they feel that they have a 'boss' who dominates them.

Real or perceived threats against autonomy are often a cause for loss of motivation. Motivation can be restored by the manager, as in this case, rejecting an authoritarian style of leadership and adopting a more democratic or laissez faire style where either he involves his employees together as a team to work with him and make joint decision-making (this can be most effectively accomplished if the organization were small) or, as in this case, makes them more responsible for the outcome and liberates them to accomplish the job as they wish provided that it would accomplished according to certain conditions. This more democratic, laissez faire…