People Dynamics Individual Assignment - Case Study
- 1. UCM 60303U3 PEOPLE DYNAMICS IN MALAYSIAN ORGANIZATIONS INDIVIDUAL ASSIGNMENT CASE STUDY: TOYOTA’S TEAM SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, BUILDING & DESIGN NAME: YEAP PHAY SHIAN STUDENT ID: 0322243 COURSE: BACHELOR OF QUANTITY SURVEYING (HONS) TUTORIAL SESSION: SEC 3 SUBMISSION DATE: 25TH APRIL 2017 Questions
- 2. 1. Discuss how Toyota can train its employees to shape team behavior and emphasise teamwork throughout the organisation. “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” This saying from the African Proverb reflects the well-deserved company, Toyota Motor Corporation’s core value, which is teamwork. Toyota Motor Corporation is a Japanese Automotive manufacturer headquartered in Toyota, Aichi, Japan. As of 2016, Toyota is named as the world’s second largest automotive manufacturer behind German Volkswagen Group. Other than teamwork, Toyota’s core values consist of trust, continuous improvement, standardization, innovation and long-term thinking. Having said that, Toyota invests $1 million dollars every hour in research and development worldwide in pursuit of being able to build better and safer cars. This is also in line with their mission statement, “Through our commitment to quality, constant innovation and respect for the planet, we aim to exceed expectations and be rewarded with a smile.” Being a company that incorporates team culture, Toyota emphasizes systems a whole lot on working collaboratively. There are several ways in which Toyota can train its employees to shape team behaviour and emphasize teamwork throughout the organization. To shape team behavior, employees should generate collective behaviours that correspond to the others. Establishing common ground rules or code of conduct, which consist of acceptable and unacceptable member behaviors, is essential as it is able to build an effective team and promote desirable behavior among the employees. To be able to build teamwork, it all starts within the individuals themselves. The Big Five Model is able to lend a hand in this sense. The Big Five personality traits are five broad domains of personality that are used to describe human personality. The Big Five includes openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. Based on the case study, Toyota’s hiring process seeks employees that portray strong teamwork capabilities. As such, Toyota’s human resource professionals can utilize The Big Five personality traits to help place employees in the organization. That is due to the fact that these dimensions are considered to be the underlying traits that make up an individual’s overall personality, which can in turn be beneficial to the hiring and
- 3. placement process. Working out the personality traits most suited to Toyota’s culture can help them to spot people who will fit in more easily. To enhance team behaviour and emphasize teamwork throughout the organization, Toyota can train its employees by encouraging the act of social activities. A sense of camaraderie can be built by formulating team activities such as having team buildings, annual dinners or even informal events, for instance, quick ice breakers, potluck lunches, meeting together over coffee at the nearby café and so on. Through these, Toyota’s employees would be able to know one another better, thus increasing mutual trust, respect and understanding. By incorporating fun shared occasions into the organization’s agenda, teamwork will be enhanced as the employees would know each other better and they are more comfortable discussing a variety of issues relating to the company. These social activities serve as a small investment in a big-time sense of team. Moreover, Toyota highlights that, “All of us are smarter than any of us.” Due to the fact that Toyota structures its work around teams, Toyota can train their employees by facilitating an idea sharing and team brainstorming environment in the work space. Setting up work areas where employees can get together to share ideas and opinions or discuss progress on their work will be able to strengthen teamwork throughout the organization. The ambience has to be in line with the desired behaviour. By the same token, Toyota has to ensure that open communication is cultivated in the team. Encouraging open communication in team meetings can help this. Also, Toyota can provide training in systematic methods so that their employees can expand its energy in the project. Furthermore, to shape team behaviour and emphasize teamwork, Toyota can implement recognition programs. To implement this, Toyota can create incentives such as bonuses and rewards to work well as a team by rewarding groups for their excellent performance or issuing small tokens of appreciation that bear the company name to acknowledge employees’ effort. To celebrate team successes publicly, Toyota can put team members names in a drawing for Toyota’s merchandise. With merely a gesture, it is able to instill a sense of meaning and value into the nature of Toyota, consequently boosting teamwork among their employees. Likewise, helping to reinforce a team’s willingness to work together and do better for Toyota when their endeavour is appreciated.
- 4. In a nutshell, Toyota’s current state is performing brilliantly and if they continue doing so by adopting the methods stated above, they will be able to shine above the rest. As quoted by The Toyota Way, “We stimulate personal and professional growth and maximize those individual and team performance.” On a final note, unity is strength and when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved.
- 5. 2. In your opinion, analyse if Toyota has succeeded because of its team- oriented culture or it could have succeeded without it. Team-oriented culture plays a truly important and significant part in Toyota. One of the company’s principles is that the synergy of teamwork is able to drive the company to greater capabilities. The four management principles (4P Model) guide employees; problem solving, people and partners, process and philosophy. So has Toyota succeeded because of its team-oriented culture or it could have succeeded without it? Toyota’s organizational culture emphasizes the involvement of employees in their respective teams. Organizational culture is defined as “a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organization” (Robbins and Judge, 2009). It is a set of assumptions, beliefs, values and norms shared by everyone in an organization. As for Toyota, the employees display the same behaviour as they share the same beliefs, whereby one of it is being a team player. Take one of the scenarios from the case study for instance, in the aftermath of devastating tsunami, employees at Toyota GB all pulled together with a ‘team spirit of personal sacrifice to guarantee the stable employment of the collective’. This proves to show that the team-oriented culture within Toyota has helped them tremendously in that sense. Besides that, Toyota has also succeeded because of its team-oriented culture due to the fact that teamwork is implemented in every operation process. Toyota is a company that undergoes highly technical operation. It is crucial to have employees that are able to work collaboratively at every operation process as innovation makes processes easier, cheaper and more effective. Even at the initial stage, Toyota has shown collective effort during the design process of a brand new car. This company truly encourages the their employees to make use of teamwork of new products and processes. Therefore, teamwork allows Toyota’s employees to share crucial skills and learn new ones, which leads to improvement of the performance of the company. To support the statement of Toyota’s success because of its team-oriented culture, the last few sentences in the case study showcased Toyota’s former CEO willing to take a step back from its pride and glory. The former CEO actually backed down from taking the spotlight for the company’s
- 6. accomplishments. This just speaks about how well cultivated he is with the idea of being in a team-oriented culture. With such a former CEO, it’s no surprise that Toyota’s employees are on the right track of working collaboratively. In addition, Toyota has succeeded because of its team-oriented culture as their teamwork has help to overcome multiple challenges. In the case of the unprecedented worldwide recession set off by the 1973 oil crisis, Toyota Motor Corporation showed that their sales were down by 14%. One of the methods Toyota implemented was the change in processes in divisions beyond manufacturing and in parts, whereby the employees worked collaboratively as a team, thus leading to an achievement rate of 128%. Just 3 years after the recession, Toyota’s Motor Corporation’s then-Executive Vice President Shoichiro Toyoda (current Honorary Chairman), spoke to the companies that won the Toyota Quality Performance Award. "Our efforts for the Quality Performance Award to improve Toyota were enabled by all the companies working together as a team," he said. I thoroughly believe that his statement back then is just as relevant as of today. Through tough times, it is crucial for employees to stand united as one to work towards a greater achievement. All in all, Toyota has definitely achieved success because of its team-oriented culture. It might have succeeded otherwise but it can be said that Toyota would not have achieved success and be where they are right now if the company did not emphasize on the efforts of their employees as a team. Therefore, Toyota has really put a lot of investment in people and organizational capabilities for development. This is able to serve as a long-term investment for them. Toyota believes that a group of motivated people can achieve so much more than the sum of individual efforts. Having said that, everything there revolves around teamwork, thus creating a mutual trust and respect throughout the entire organization. As the saying goes, “Teamwork divides the work and multiplies the success.”
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