Culture at Toyota Motor Corporation
Toyota Motor Corporation established since 1937 in Japan, Aichi and now world’s leader in manufacturing of automobile using latest of technologies. Toyota’s organisational Culture has powerful contribution in the success, improvement and advancement. Employees are the backbone of any industries; Toyota’s organization culture is operating by 4 HR practices within TPS (Toyota Production System).
Team work: Attitude and aim of an individual towards work has great impact on company’s continuous improvement (McWilliams, 2006). Team job, focus on quality production, easy access to resolve problems, workers friendly communication, job allocation as per education.
Quality: Quality is crown of Toyota’s organisational culture. People strained to pay high amount for quality car provided.
Secrecy: Its Toyota’s employees whose effort has created continuous improvement support for innovations by applying uncountable process for recover failures and expansion. No word called secrecy avail for these incidents.
Continuous improvement through learning: Failures makes company more perfect by solving issues. This is a learning process through continuous improvement. This is a key to success for Toyota (Adams, 2007).
Above principles if followed by every automobile manufacturing organisation, than there will be constant improvement and innovations in the market which will only lead to quality products and company’s growth and success.
Toyota had done great expansion worldwide till 2009. 2011 was the disaster year for automobile industries of Japan due to earthquake which minimised.Tendency of any organisations like Toyota to focus on cost cutting in times of crises and natural disaster. But Toyota during 1990 after big success worldwide, they focused more on producing more cars with less focus on their objective target of manufacturing quality cars with new ideas and innovations (Stacey, 2007). Incurring less finance on car making brings down its quality and other process and plan went wrong. President and other high executives of Toyota recollect how 7.43 millions of cars have won the hearts of people worldwide. Company has given service to vehicles to repair its damaged parts to control for future damage. Employees have now removed their main focus on quality maintenance to quantities. Innovations process ideas have gone down in order to focus on more production due to lack of time. Lesson learned from this case is during rough times in spite of focus on savings money by increasing production, company like Toyota whose main motto is to give best quality cars should be maintain by encouraging and educating employees to maintain monopoly.
Akio Toyoda, the president of Toyota had taken right decision to issue letter and statement apologising customers for their big loss of loosing near and dear one due to safety reasons. President even confirm and make people believe that their cars are safe and of best quality. Akio mentioned in his statement that and assured public that their cars are not in danger and not to be worried. Leader in automobile industry globally with best technology and process for making cars we promise people for delivering best quality cars (Mzembe, 2014). He assured to make innovations in quality management and no further such crises. Our aim and main objective is to achieve success through Quality Excellence. Akio Toyoda appearance in conference with apology for incident and commitments and statements regarding best quality service since years is well acknowledged.
Importance of Organizational Culture for a Carmaker
Toyota’s organisation culture has good impact on other industries is to motivate and inspire workers to produce quality cars with implementation of best of policies and ideas with continues innovations. Toyota’s nature is to allocate work to employees as per their ability and education for best of results (Tate, 2010). Company’s growth, profitability, superiority all depends on this main element called employees satisfaction and providing well created culture like Toyota(Jeffery Liker and Michael Hoseus).
David Raymond Morgan former chairman of Australian Bankers association as well as CEO of Westpac’s Banking Corporation’s which ranks 4th in Australian Bank and leads in top 20’s worldwide in capitalization. After he left work at Australian Federal Treasury he joined Westpac as Deputy Managing Director. David Morgan played a very crucial role to bring back Westpac Corporation back to successful level. In the year 1992 Westpac corporation suffered highest loss, financial crises forced management to fire employees and its insolvency took its position to lower level. Being well experienced in baking sector and finance, Morgan was aware of every pros and cons of banking sector. Bank’s nature and its responsibility towards society and people were intentionally ignored and were deeply criticized and its effect came in form of closing of many branches (Wang, 2010). David said their only aim was to satisfy shareholders by giving them profit, but ignored essential element, staff to fulfill their desire and responsibility. Morgan’s aimed to become all-rounder by taking responsibility of social environment, staff and shareholders. So he followed regulations and legislations to fulfill long term view. His approach was continued by later took over CEO’s.
Stakeholders support helped David Morgan to fulfill its plans and views to bring down closure of branches further and targeting to fulfill social responsibility towards people by providing services like sanctioning loans and finance for several uses. Staff was back to normal daily job and was given salary on time (Brooks, 2009). Happy employees work more efficiently. Few stakeholders were in difficult situation when bank went to severe crises that if it will not be recovered bank might will close or will have to sell to other corporation. But it was because of highly talented and experienced David Morgan bank is back to its previous operation and profitability. If this views was discarded by stakeholders and conflicted on views of profitability to be stick to only stakeholders, it would have driven bank to closer but this decision and conflict might have took CEO to level of confusion and tough situation to follow its principles and views to solve issues as per his experience (Jackson, 2007).
Toyoda’s Apology
Challenges faced by CEO David Morgan during his work tenure were well marked. When he joined Westpac, It was in a critical situation where its branches were almost closing. Applying polices directly on joining was next to impossible as stakeholders were involved. He was in Dilemma whether to fulfill social responsibility should be taken as priority along with staff interest fulfillment or just to make stakeholders profitability maintenance on top (Perrini, 2006). Sharing experience and with setting conference with stakeholders to make understand, that banks are public organizations and its success solely depends on people desire and requirement fulfillment. A staff that is backbone of organization has to be taken as priority to continue growth of bank. So stakeholder’s great support helped Davis Morgan was able to retain its Position in Australian bank .Now its stand on 20th position globally by marinating and following his principles by current management (Rollinson, 2008).
An organization is functioned and run by visions and missions as described by its top management and leaders. In case a leader in an organization decides adopt corporate social responsibility and lead with such visions then the entire team and all members as well as internal stakeholders are bound to follow the same (Nwagbara, 2013). CEO being a top leader for the organization his visions related to corporate social responsibility is bound to impact and affect the entire organizational ways and methods. With such leadership it is possible to attain goals and objectives for the organization.
Wespac had faced immense turmoil during its critical phase that could have resulted in loss of brand name and face value for the Company. By incorporating in corporate social responsible behavior it became essential that the bank had greater concerns towards the society and environment. Thus, extension of the corporate social responsibility was a way adopted by the Company to regain its foothold in the market and attain its goals and to look beyond the crisis period (Rupp, 2006).
Virus Hunter’s includes a Company with large number of online systems and security tracker who regularly deliver according to customer expectations. With increasing and emerging trends globally these hunters are every day and all-round the clock tracing programs as well as designing structures for organizations as well as for individual customers such that virus threats and attacks do not cause an issue (Navi, 2012). As the nature of the work remains critical, they function in an extremely high pressure and rapid situation whereby they work randomly devising ways and means to solve challenges and issues at work. Though they started off as a small company yet now their structure is huge and they are based globally such that they can track down viruses for global customers and gain competitive advantages. Due to the very nature of the work there are extreme challenges as sometimes they might be successful and at other they might not be as much successful. This hampers their efficiency as well as effectiveness.
What Other Organizations Can Learn from Toyota’s Experience
The aim of the management as well as all team members is to resolve issues pertaining to solving of virus threats (Matten, 2008). The computer teams continuously fights computer viruses but there are various challenges to manage a team of professionals as well as group of customer volunteers. The customer expectations changes in a rapid manner, which often makes it difficult for professionals to deliver according to expectations. The professionals are trained core professionals yet there are errors as to how they can be accommodated to fit to manage customer expectations.
Symantec is operating as an effective Company that caters to customer needs and wants to deliver according to their expectations. The Company needs to follow certain adaptive organizational designs to meet its needs that will help it meet its customer expectations as well as for its professionals in an effective manner (Lozano, 2013). The organizational design that will be most suitable for the organization includes flat type of structure. A flat structure as compared to a hierarchical structure will help maintain steady communication amongst its members and to understand the dynamics of working such that customer expectation scan be better understood. A flat structure will enable not only communication but will also be able to handle complex expectations and team members can share regarding their experiences to each other that can be used to enhance professionalism as well as skills for managing techniques. Whereas customers are the direct stakeholders for the Company the volunteers include those who want cyber criminals to be tracked down and crimes be faced rather effectively. A flattened organizational structure is more effective compared to a hierarchical one as in a hierarchical structure there is delegation of responsibilities from senior or top management levels and juniors executes the task merely.
Symantec operates within an environment where they need to handle complex challenges a market shifting as well as challenges of complex products. While the Company started its operations it had only a small number of people with the industry being slow type. With rapid spread of viruses threats to individual clients as well as to organizations have increased in a dynamic way and manner (Mullins, 2007). They have teams from around the globe to manage their complex operations and functionalities. The Company never goes off for a while at it has been deigned in a manner that when one part of the Company from a corner of the globe gets non-functional then someone else takes up a role in another part of the world. The core competency of the organization lies in its effectiveness to coordinate and manage function effectively between its various branch office spread around the world. But a feature that is unique to all its employees is the nature of their problem solving that allows handling complex challenges and virus hunting. Now they are tracking cyber criminals who have greater intentions than harming a computer starting from stealing of information to handling complex challenges as well as potential threats that can be used to harm users of information. They track down cyber criminals by use of various technologies which are rather hard to trace, by way of recruiting computer victims as well as computer users to help them identify the signals of such hacks. Such flattened organizational structure is useful for Symantec as it enables dynamic handling of responsibilities as well as critical task management.
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