Did Toyota 's Culture Cause Its Problems?

GM is described as an organization with a dysfunctional company culture that somehow still manages to have amazing results in its work, on a global scale. The key attributes of GM, were primarily in the changes initiated by Mary Barra after the GM ignition switch recall crisis. Some of those attributes include her willingness to openly acknowledge the undesirable aspects of the GM culture and her efforts to take action towards a resolution. There are also several noticeable strengths and weaknesses within the organization. One of the biggest weaknesses is the company’s repeated inability to acknowledge that, lack of functional culture and leadership are truly the root cause of the company’s issues. Based on my reading I would describe the current behavioral organizational model as a Custodial Model. I chose this model because the managerial orientation is money, employee orientation is security and benefits and performance results are passive cooperation. All of these attributes were described in the reading.

Among other reasons, the GM culture has been described as a culture full of crisis in the study. The ignition switch issue in the study is articulated to the company’s culture; numerous parties touched the issue concerning the engineers, investigators, and lawyers. No one among these groups raised the problem to the highest level of the company to the point when it caused harm to the company’s name as well as employees lives, this justifies that the company had great culture crisis since good culture practices usually portray a good image to the company.

Lueneburger, Christoph (2014). Lessons from Chrysler: how to rev up a purpose-driven corporate culture. Retrieved from

When an organization does not use a holistic approach towards their culture, structure and systems, the organization could create a poor working environment for its employees and poor results for their customers. An example of culture, structure and systems not working well together can be seen in General Motors (GM). GM prior to its bankruptcy was seen to be a “highly bureaucratic company in which brands, departments and regions operated like self-governing and competing states with a federation” (Smerd, J. 2009).

In 2009 Toyota encountered a public backlash after the discovery of a potentially catastrophic engineering defect among its brand of automobiles including its best-selling Corolla and Camry models. This led to a massive and global recall of approximately 10 million units a year later. The engineering defect caused the models to accelerate out of control and put their drivers and other

Before this chapter I thought organization’s culture was only internal and outside factors only affect the brand and sales of the company. But I have now learned a lot more about the

The mechanisms for changing organizational culture that Mr. Marchionne used at Chrysler were to change the workflow and the structure of the organization. The old ways of Chrysler were not working as the company was forced into bankruptcy. In a reaction to failing sales, the previous management at Chrysler slashed prices, which was not a valid solution to the problem. However, Mr. Marchionne has a different approach. When he took over, he fired top executives, took away the layers of bureaucracy, and injected fear into those that were left. The hierarchy model was no longer working at Chrysler, so Mr. Marchionne got in the trenched with those he select as his management team and together they worked together to bring Chrysler out of bankruptcy. In return, the culture at Chrysler moved to an adhocracy in that leaders were empowered to seek innovation to create sustainable growth for the organization (Kreitner & Kiniski, 2013).

When Sergio Marchionne first took the helm at Chrysler he was handed a company that had just declared bankruptcy and accepted a bailout loan from the U.S. government (McNulty, 2014). Needless to say, it was not a successful culture. He knew before he would ever see success he would have to change the way employees behaved, what they valued, what they expected, and make them believe that with his guidance they could be successful again. He knew he would have to change the entire makeup of the organizational culture. Here I will outline some of the mechanisms Marchionne utilized to change the organizational culture of Chrysler.

Organizational cultures that can be a liability to an organization include those that create barriers to change, create barriers to diversity or barriers to mergers and acquisitions. (Robbins, S. P. 2011) Organizational cultures are also good for change and revitalization of a company. This paper will provide background information on Best Buy and the ROWE (Results-Only Work Environment) Program. This paper will describe the culture of Best Buy. This paper will also discuss the approach to organizational change that the ROWE program illustrates. This case has sources of stress and this paper will discuss the sources that are apparent in the case. Changes have occurred

This report is about the General Motor’s failed corporate culture over the last decade that led to a serious safety defect in millions of vehicles sold around the world that claimed numerous lives. General Motor’s main challenges were dealing with the recall of 2.6 millions vehicles and acknowledging the accusations of employees. There were opportunities given to General Motor’s members and staffs to stand up, speak up and fix a minor problem back then, but no one took the initiative to study all the possibilities surrounding the ignition switch.

As if this weren’t enough, quality problems mounted week after week. Only months later in February 2010, the NHTSA revealed that it had received claims citing another life threatening defect in the break system for the Toyota Prius. More than 400 thousand Prius recalls resulted. In April of 2010, customers reported handling issues in the Lexus brand which resulted in another recall of 9,400 Lexus cars and a “Don’t Buy: Safety Risk” rating from Consumer Reports. Also in April, the company voluntarily recalled Siennas to address a problem with corrosion on a spare tire cable. Later that month, Toyota voluntarily recalled 2003 Sequoia SUVs to improve the stability controls. 2010 Tacomas were also recalled for defective front drive shafts. Once the quality icon, Toyota had hit a really low point; so low that credit

Mr. Marchionne’s mechanism for changing the organizational culture of the Chrysler corporation was to utilize the market culture.” A market culture has a strong external focus and values stability and control. Organizations with this culture are driven by competition and a strong desire to deliver results and accomplish goals. Because this type of culture is focused on the external environment, customers and profits take precedence over employee development and satisfaction” ( ). Mr. Marchionne’s Unwise decisions related to discounts and enticements made by the upper management, unfortunately resulted in negatively impacting Chrysler’s bottom line and leaving them to make the ultimately decision of bankruptcy.

Due to Toyota’s financial greed and unethical practice, vehicles were wrongly equipped with faulty brakes, sticking pedals and poor quality door looks, which caused death of many Toyota customers and hundreds of dollars in damages. When a company like Toyota acts in an ethically questionable manner, it causes the company to lose customers and develop a negative reputation. Customer tend to lose faith in the company and have to look for better service

”Hold on and pray.” These were the last words spoken to a 911 operator on August 29, 2009, before the speaker, Christopher Lastrella, and 3 family members died in a horrific car accident in San Diego, California. The cause of the crash? The pedal of the rented Lexus E350 was stuck in full throttle, hurtling the car down the highway at speeds of up to 120 miles per hour, rendering the brakes completely useless. Those who passed away included two adult men, an adult woman, and a thirteen year old girl. Upon further investigation, it was determined that the floor mat had caused the accelerator to be caught and unable to be released.

A web-enabled platform was introduced, which was integrated with group-work, whereby the specially-trained ‘coach’ of the group could relay feedback and advice to participants. Bajer, the specialist who came in to aid the process, noted that after 100 days new behaviours and new ways of doing things had formed, with new language coming with this. Employee engagement, measured each year, was at an all-time high. The message that was taken from this was ‘it is possible to change the culture of an organisation... no matter how challenging it might seem at the start’ (Losada and Bajer, 2010). Similar success can be seen with NUMMI, a joint venture between General Motors and Toyota, outlined by John Shook (2010). What was seen here mainly affected the chronically under-performing Fremont plant of GM, but did have significant effects across the company. Previously there had been a culture upon which management had no control over. Quality had been known to be sabotaged and absenteeism often reached 20%; more than anything the culture was ‘anti-General Motors’. However, after the majority of workers were sent to Japan for training and then the adoption of not only Toyota’s stop-the-line production system1, as well as some of their key principles, a mutual trust was formed and the culture was reformed. Toyota’s ‘Respect for People’ tenet (Shook, 2010) summarised the vast change that had