Summary
The consequences of the strike are often disturbing: people do not understand how to work afterward. In General Motors, there are significant concerns about imbalanced teamwork. These include new contracts, lower wages, staff decline, and improper medical insurance.
Moreover, some past events collapsed the working atmosphere in General Motors (GM), such as the multiple struggles of the 2000s, the ignition key incident, recalls of many cars, and multimillion debt. The issues should be solved on many levels: operational, technological, leadership, employee engagement, morale, etc. Applying organizational psychology theories is also helpful: Maslow’s hierarchy, Theories X and Y, McKinsey’s 7S, and other approaches. Maintaining a safe workplace for employees is necessary, implying high motivation and productivity and developing strategies that will allow workers to feel comfortable within their workplace.
Background
General Motors (GM) is a huge multinational corporation that designs, produces, and distributes cars and vehicle details worldwide. The company was one of the most successful vehicle manufacturers and owned significant stakes in foreign brands. However, General Motors faced difficulties in 2007, leading to bankruptcy in 2009; the company’s CEO had to appeal for financial support. In 2009, GM had to announce their bankrupts; indeed, the company had to accept a considerable debt. The company decides to deal with this problem by excluding multiple models of their vehicles, closing factories, and firing many employees. Despite being the leader in the international market of cars, GM still has an enormous doubts.
United Automobile Workers (UAW), a labor union, agreed to support GM’s employees by increasing their wages and giving them certain benefits. However, workers still suffered from lowered salaries with the flow of time. The lack of a workforce was apparent: GM lost their employees, despite workers accepting structural changes. Moreover, the incident of 2014 subjected GM to more complicated struggles. The strike connected with the dismissal of employees’ medical insurance and lowered wages due to staff reduction happened. These main issues collapsed the company and led to the instability.
Business Strategy Development
It is crucial to determine which problems arose during employees’ strikes and seek practical solutions. On the operational level, which means supervising employees and being first-line managers, it can be effective to calm people down and listen to them. Moreover, it is crucial to understand that a similar idea unites people that go to strike: their behavior, thoughts, and values often split and create a united intelligence. This phenomenon usually refers to the collective unconscious, and it is essential to appeal to the group as a whole (Fordham, 2018). There is a necessity to calm people down and listen to their terms and requirements. A compassionate, kind, and emphatic leader will keep people calm (Hakanen and Pessi, 2018). Accessibility, empathy, and responsiveness are critical features of operational-level managers.
The technological level uses technical knowledge and solves related issues, and different decisions might affect the company’s workers. It can be an excellent solution to provide workers with a fixed salary, which the government and company’s policies establish minimum. Therefore, wages cannot be less than a set minimum. Concerns about the new contract changing the company’s policy can be clear, and employees’ reactions are negatively predictable. The agreement should be reviewed to satisfy the needs of CEOs, managers, and employees. The CEO of GM, Mary Barra, claims that closing plants are connected with automatization (Euronews, 2018). It might become a reason for firing 14,000 employees (Euronews, 2018). Indeed, it is possible to requalify many workers into IT specialists and technical support workers. It can save a vast part of the staff. It is vital to fix the supply chain and achieve it through proper planning and execution. It is necessary to think about possible supply chain scenarios, generate connections with reliable linking elements of the chain, and invent different solutions to provide quality management.
Abraham Maslow’s theory is a famous approach for measuring human needs. The theory of hierarchy needs first appeared in Maslow’s book Motivation and Personality, and this date is considered a foundation of the approach (Suyono and Mudjanarko, 2017). Overall, the policy deals with five concepts of human life. It includes physiological, safety, love, esteem, and self-actualization needs (Oved, 2017). The main idea of Maslow’s theory is that the person cannot reach the next step of the pyramid until he is done with the previous. Maslow’s theory applies to the situation with the General Motors strike, and it is essential to look at why: employees seek to have financial stability, and their motivation is clear. Moreover, employees’ desire for money and safety is proven by the company’s absence of proper medical and economic conditions. Therefore, it is crucial to create the pyramid of GM employees’ needs:
It is also essential to motivate people and maintain collective employee morale. According to Theories X and Y, people are encouraged to work when their needs and expectations are satisfied. X assumes little motivation and responsibility avoidance, while Y is inspired to work without direct reward. Therefore, it is essential to lead GM employees in the Y direction, as workers are encouraged to work for the long run when their expectations are fulfilled (Tahir and Iraqi, 2018). Several issues that can raise motivation in employees and improve the overall atmosphere are monthly financial bonuses, discounts for vehicles, and extra bonuses.
Moreover, one organizational psychology approach to work is the self-leadership theory. It states that people use several strategies to motivate themselves to do tasks. It includes thinking methods and self-rewards, with the help of which employees can raise their awareness and focus on work (Maykrantz and Houghton, 2018). Strategies of the self-leadership approach strive to increase inner motivation by changing the attitude to the task in a positive direction (Neck et al., 2019). It might be helpful to arrange business training to inspire GM workers; it will also help understand their values, preferences, and desires at the workplace to improve relations between managers and employees. In addition, leadership positioning and relations with employees might be enhanced by lowering power distance, as workers want to be heard, and smaller spaces can fix the problem.
Strike avoidance is a complex issue; however, it might be possible to conduct. Employees require being heard and listened to their complaints during and after the strike. The struggle requires understanding the basics of human psychology, and it is necessary not to mute employees to prevent a huge problem. Interaction, communication, and feedback might help the leaders and employees to hear each other. It is possible to gather reviews and complaints with the help of online or offline surveys twice a year to avoid serious problems. Surveys can become good indicators of changes and dynamics of the company’s success. Middle managers can serve as mediators between employees and leaders of GM – it might help avoid misunderstanding, and every member will interact to solve the issue.
Moreover, determining employees’ terms and leaders’ goals is essential. For example, it will be helpful to identify precise facts that do not satisfy the staff—in addition to avoiding pressure from both sides to understand the problems to be addressed. It is possible to evaluate tradeoffs concerning workers’ salaries according to the established wage standards and the GM’s policy. Furthermore, it is helpful to implement strategies of organizational psychology. For instance, the path-goal theory is an excellent framework to motivate employees with the help of compassionate leadership. It is essential to maintain friendly and trustful relations within all layers of the staff to improve the workplace atmosphere.
The business solution for GM will be the following: identifying the company’s mission and values, development of corporate culture and maintenance of good relations in the company, and developing unique working skills. Making smart investments and implementing innovations are also ways to achieve the goal.
Moreover, McKinsey 7S is a working framework for determining the precise goals and objectives of the company. After implementing and combining these approaches, every member of the staff is involved, the interaction between people will improve, and every worker will understand the company’s direction. The framework for General Motors will be the following:
From both personal and professional perspectives, organizational psychology knowledge, undergoing psychological business training, and intercultural communication experience would help me investigate, assess, and improve the situation in GM. I might be an appropriate candidate to solve issues of the company due to the unique combination of business and psychological approaches. According to some studies, combining professional and theoretical knowledge is one of the best ways to make significant improvements (Hakanen and Pessi, 2018). For instance, a similar business strategy leads the Lego company to success, so I rely on constant development (Sommer, 2019). Moreover, I think that my compassion, empathy, purposefulness, and care skills might attract the GM to choose me as a consultant.
Reference List
Euronews. (2018). General Motors to close plants and cut jobs to cope with ailing market. Web.
Fordham, M. (2018). Analytical Psychology. Great Britain: Taylor & Francis.
Hakanen, J. J., and Pessi, A. B. (2018). ‘Practicing compassionate leadership and building spirals of inspiration in business and in public sector’, Practicing Servant Leadership, pp. 119–140. Web.
Maykrantz, S. A., & Houghton, J. D. (2018). ‘Self-leadership and stress among college students: examining the moderating role of coping skills’, Journal of American College Health, 68(1), pp. 89–96. Web.
Neck, C. P., Manz, C. C., and Houghton, J. D. (2019). Self-Leadership. New York: SAGE Publications.
Oved, O. (2017). ‘Rethinking the place of love needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’, Society, 54(6), pp. 537–538. Web.
Sommer, A. F. (2019). ‘Agile transformation at LEGO Group’, Research-Technology Management, 62(5), pp. 20–29. Web.
Suyono, J., and Mudjanarko, S. W. (2017). ‘Motivation engineering to employee by employees Abraham Maslow theory’, Journal of Education, Teaching and Learning, 2(1), pp. 86-92. Web.
Tahir, H. K., and Iraqi, M. K. (2018). ‘Employee performance and retention: a comparative analysis of theory X, Y and Maslow’s theory’,Journal of Management Sciences, 5(1), pp. 100–110. Web.