Toyota Motor Corporation determined several strategies to implement within the company in order to overcome the problems connected with safety issues, ineffective management, and winning back the customers’ loyalty in relation to the brand. It was announced in the company’s annual report of 2011 that Toyota Motor Corporation is ready to implement definite strategic changes regarding the organizational structure, basing on the main aspects of the corporate culture. Thus, the definite changes in human resources were expected with references to the structural modifications in order to create the competitive management structure and renew the company’s image. The main changes were connected with restructuring the company’s hierarchy in relation to providing more rights to the lower managers, reconstructing the Toyota Group to centralize the company, in transforming the decision-making process, and expressing more interests in the customers’ opinions and vision of the company’s products (Toyota: Annual report 2011, 2012). The corporate culture of Toyota Motor Corporation is based on valuing the role of the individual in the process and the individual’s creativity, much attention is paid to the company’s reputation based on the quality of the products. However, the decision-making process was too based on the company’s complex hierarchy to provide the quick response to the definite issues or customers’ expectations. It was necessary to develop the approach according to which managers could make the necessary decisions according to the current data and information. The definite changes in the decision-making system proposed by the company’s strategic department can be discussed as successful to address the mentioned issues. The main challenges for the implementation of this strategy are based on the peculiarities of the company’s organizational structure depending on the strict vertical hierarchy. According to the new strategies, more rights should be given to the local management groups of the company with references to the general flexibility used in the decision-making process. The next strategy is the focus on the position of the general manager to provide the direct communication with the team leaders and employees in order to reactive the access to the on-site information according to which it is possible to make the conclusions about further continuation of the work or overcoming the problematic issues. The team leaders, engineers, and specialists should be also involved in the problem solving process in order support the company’s claims about the focus on the role of everyone in the company’s development (Toyota. Vision and philosophy, 2012). It is possible to state that the mentioned strategies are important for the implementation within Toyota Motor Corporation to make its corporate structure and culture more flexible in relation to the modern and globalization tendencies, but the effective implementation of the strategies which are associated with changing the approaches to corporate organization is based on the effective pre-implementation work.
Questions 1. Identify and explain whether Toyota was planning to implement changes in its strategy and how?
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