Toyota’s culture
For many years, Toyota’s corporate culture has ensured that there is teamwork among all employees in manufacturing its cars and car parts. This has made the company stand out from other motor vehicle industries. The company’s enacted values are comprised of five discrete components: teamwork, respect, and challenge, Kaizen, and genchi genbutsu. The company’s business process entails a continuous process of improving its products.
This is the kaizen value. This is a culture that has been entrenched in the blood of all staff working with the company. To ensure that they effectively solve problems affecting their customers, Toyota staff believes in going to the root of the problem and looking for a solution from there (McCuddy, 2010, p. 574). Decision on steps to take after identifying the problems is reached upon through a consensus by all staff.
Instead of taking challenges as a hindrance to their performance, the company’s staffs consider it as a wake-up call and a motivation to facilitate in enhancing their performance. The culture of teamwork in the company makes the staffs give the company’s matters a priority. This has led to them sharing ideas when addressing any problem affecting the company. As the company has a culture of respect for each other, they are always willing to listen to each person’s ideas and share knowledge.
Since its inception, the company has emphasized the culture of ensuring that it offers quality products to its customers. However, this has not been the case. The company has concentrated on incremental growth and forgot to ensure that it offers quality products. This was reflected by cases of the company being forced to recall some of its cars due to mechanical problems during their manufacture.
Effects of ‘Toyota way’ culture
The success of any organization lies behind its organizational culture. Organizations with a strong positive organizational culture experience more growth than those that do not have. The ‘Toyota way’ culture has been instrumental in enhancing the company’s performance. The culture has brought together all employees within the company thus encouraging teamwork. It has been the reason behind the competitive advantage of the company. ‘Toyota way’ culture has led to the company experiencing significant incremental growth (McCuddy, 2010, p. 574).
Despite the culture helping the company experience incremental growth and gain a competitive advantage, it is the reason behind the company’s trend of lowering the quality of its products. Staff have concentrated on improving the company’s incremental growth and forgot to ensure that they offer quality products.
Challenges experienced in transforming Toyota’s global culture
The global international culture of Toyota Company has helped it experience incremental growth. The company has been able to manufacture and sell a lot of cars every year. This has led to it being competitive. However, the inability of the company to produce quality products has led to the management embarking on shifting from global expansion to quality enhancement. In this undertaking, the company faces the challenge of losing its global market.
To focus on quality, the company has to cut down on the number of vehicles it manufactures (Nelson & Quick, 2009, pp. 123-136). This has negatively affected its global growth by reducing its market size. Its international growth strategy has led to the company losing its competitive advantage due to the production of low-quality products. In changing the company’s culture, it is experiencing the challenges of coming up with new methods of car production. The company also faces the challenge of having to recruit new staff or training its staff to deal with the new production methods.
Reference List
McCuddy, M. K. (2010). Developing chinks in the vaunted “Toyota Way”.
Nelson, D. L. & Quick, J. C. (2009). Organizational science, the real world, and you (6th Ed). South-Western: Mason.