Question

2. What are the pros and cons of Toyota structure?

Answer 1

The managers of Toyota are currently facing various issues. By 2012 they had to recall more than nine million cars since there were strong claims that they had defects. Recalling this huge number of cars would results in huge losses. First, there would be the cost of repairing these vehicles so that they can be roadworthy. Then there is the amount of time spent focusing on the repair or damage control due to the defective vehicles that could be used in other productive activities. Meanwhile, as they are busy recalling the vehicles, their competitors are focusing on production and this could mean increase in their sales. The management has to work double and strategize on how to manage this mishap so that it does not result in unnecessary huge company losses. The managers’ methods of handling this crisis will significantly affect the turnover of the company. This thus calls for a lot of professionalism and tact when handling the situation. Moreover, the company has been the cause of thirty-seven deaths since the year 2000. This kind of information when released to the public negatively affects how the public perceives the company. The case study reports that unintended acceleration was one of the major reasons why the vehicles were recalled. The managers of Toyota will have to find out the effect of this kind of information on the attitudes of the consumers and reverse them. The managers are also confronted with the need to engage in more effective advertisement to correct the dented image of the company. They also need to assess their production techniques to make sure that such defects will not occur again anytime in future. I. Management concepts and theories

Toyota has a strong culture because they have core values and norms which are widely shared among over 30,000 staff members. The company has an integrationist perspective of culture. The integrated culture has led to the company’s huge success. It shares organization-wide agreement of managerially sanctioned values. The Michigan Model of human resource management can critically evaluate the issues raised in the case study when based on Theory X (Rudman, 1999). The theory points out that the workers avoid responsibility and they cannot be trusted. When a company calls back nine million vehicles, a number almost equal to the number of cars produced annually, then somebody is definitely underperforming. There must be a whole department full of employees of Toyota who have been mandated with the responsibility of ensuring that the vehicles produced are fit for the road. Their failure to ensure that over nine million vehicles do not go to the market fit makes them not easy to be trusted. The workers can also be classified as lazy since industrious workers would never let...