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MGMT Case Study Toyota Crisis

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Case Study for MGMT
The Case Study “Did Toyota’s Culture Cause Its Problems?” illustrates the slow reaction to safety problems and the arrogant culture of
Toyota regarding the issue of unintended acceleration (Robbins &Judge
2013). The key issues in the case study are the arrogant culture of
Toyota, miscommunication, groupthink and poor human resource management. The problems in Toyota began with the recall of 10000
Laxus Cars in 2000 (Finch 2010, p 475), followed by a series of recalls for different models in 2010 (Robbins & Judge 2013). These recalls associated with the unintended acceleration gave birth to lots of questions regarding the countermeasures of Toyota towards safety and the culture of the organization. The …show more content…

Intra-organizational communication occurs inside of an organization which generally engages organizational members (Clegg et al. 2011). In case of
Toyota, when the problems associated with unintended acceleration arose, Toyota reacted slowly to the problems and failed to find the real cause of the crisis (Finch 2010, p.474). Later a quality advisory panel developed by Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota, stated that the flaws created by the unintended acceleration damaged information sharing and miscommunication and slowed down response time to quality and safety issues (Ohnsman 2011, cited in Taneja, Pryor, Sewell
2012, p. 128). This provides a clean example of Toyota having miscommunication within the company.

Mass communication problem was also evident in Toyota. Mass communication reaches many receivers from one point(Clegg et al.
2011), thus helps to build strong relationships with key Stakeholders
(Clegg et al. 2011). But, in Toyota, the corporate leaders did not have the courage to face the public for several weeks on critical safety issues, therefore, they risked the trust of Toyota’s dealers and customers worldwide’ (Heller and Darling 2011, p.11). This justifies poor mass communication in Toyota.

Human Resource Management
The lack of skilled Human Resource Management was noticeable throughout the Toyota crisis. Human Resource

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