Question Final Case Study: Toyota Company Recall

The case is attached as a Word Document (along with the questions) under Readings and Activities.

First analyze the case and then provide detailed answers to the seven (7) questions outlined in the Word Doc file. Then, submit that Word Doc file to this assignment link by Saturday at midnight. The questions need to have complete academic data followed by observations based on your readings in the textbook, information from the Library, accredited websites, business journals, magazines and newspapers. This is a good case to test your knowledge since it covers several of the subjects we have reviewed in class.

The grading for this assignment will be based on the Assignment Grading Rubric (under Course Information). If needed when answering the questions use bullets to explain several points.

CASE – TOYOTA MOTOR COMPANY’S RECALL DEBACLE: DID TOYOTA TAKE A WRONG TURN? case from the textbook by Robert N. Lussier and John R. Hendon entitled Human Resource Management, Functions, Applications, Skill Development (2013), Appendix B.

Final Case Study: Toyota Company Recall

Toyota Motor Company’s Recall Debacle: Did Toyota Take a Wrong Turn?

Case study by Andrea Markowitz

It was a public relations disaster of unimagined proportions for the automotive manufacturing industry icon. On September 29, 2009, Toyota Motor Company (TMC) announced that it would recall 3.8 million vehicles in the United States, due to unintended acceleration. By May of 2011, the recall surged to approximately 14 million vehicles.

A media outcry began after an accelerator pedal caught in the floor mat and caused the deaths of a California highway patrol officer and three family members in August of 2009. Toyota’s president of three months, Akio Toyoda, responded to the tragedy by offering a public apology. Both Toyota and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigated what may have caused the unintended acceleration, and both concluded that a faulty design allowed accelerator pedals to become caught in the floor mat and to stick in the accelerating position. (Toyota also noted, however, that nearly all of the crashes that occurred while the driver was trying to brake resulted from the driver mistakenly pressing the accelerator instead of the brake.) U.S. Government regulators fined Toyota nearly $50 million for taking too long to initiate recalls.

On May 23, 2011, a seven-member North American Quality Advisory Panel (NAQAP), created in 2010 by Toyota and headed by former United States Secretary of Transportation Rodney E. Slater, released a report that said Toyota had been slow to discover the floor mat and accelerator pedal issues because the company ignored customer and government regulator complaints about sudden acceleration. It also said Toyota had failed to apply its “Toyota Way” manufacturing process principles, which, in part, direct employees to detect and respond to problems quickly, and to encourage timely and effective communications between employees, management and executives.

The Toyota Way, 2001

In 2001, Toyota executives created corporate principles to encourage the continuous improvement of processes and people through training, teamwork, and management/employee relations, which they dubbed “the Toyota Way”. On December 21 of that year, a Toyota press release announced that in January, 2002, the company would establish the Toyota Institute, an internal organization for training Toyota Way principles to executives and middle management in Japan’s TMC and its overseas affiliates.

The press release stated that these principles considered the effects of globalization and diversity (“people with diverse perceptions”) on human resources and “the global Toyota team”, and that Toyota conducted a review of its human-resource training structures to identify best practices for ensuring “a continuous reservoir of personnel with a shared commitment to the Toyota Way.” The press release added, “Toyota sees human resource training as one of the most vital issues in today’s increasingly challenging age of mega-competition.”

The long-term strategic motivation behind the Toyota Way was to identify and develop people who could work “lean” and optimize efficiency, in order to support TMC’s aggressive push to become the world’s largest automotive manufacturer. TMC executives were well aware that implementing this strategy would require creating a culture in which employees supported the Toyota Way principles worldwide. As Toyota reports on its corporate website (http://www.toyota-global.com/sustainability/stakeholders/employees.html), its fundamental stance on human resource development is “making things is about developing people.” The website also states that Toyota’s human resource development is based on on-the-job training in addition to establishing and improving educational systems that focus on sharing and conveying appropriate values in accordance with the Toyota Way.

Putting Principles into Practice?

The Toyota Way’s 14 principles combine a long-term strategic vision with the day-to-day practices that are designed to make the vision a reality. Several principles and their respective practices are especially relevant to Toyota’s defective floor mat and accelerator mismanagement. The following summary is a distillation of these principles from Jeffrey Liker’s book, The Toyota Way. [2004. NY: McGraw-Hill]

Section I: Long-Term Philosophy

Principle 1. Base your management decisions on a long-term philosophy, even at the expense of short-term financial goals.

? Have a philosophical sense of purpose that supersedes any short-term decision making. Work, grow, and align the whole organization toward a common purpose that is bigger than making money.

Principle 5. Build a culture of stopping to fix problems, to get quality right the first time.

? Quality for the customer drives your value proposition.

? Build into your organization support systems to quickly solve problems and put in place countermeasures.

? Build into your culture the philosophy of stopping or slowing down to get quality right the first time to enhance productivity in the long run.

Section III: Add Value to the Organization by Developing Your People

Principle 9. Grow leaders who thoroughly understand the work, live the philosophy, and

teach it to others.

? Grow leaders from within, rather than buying them from outside the organization.

? Do not view the leader’s job as simply accomplishing tasks and having good people skills. Leaders must be role models of the company’s philosophy and way of doing business.

? Good leaders must understand the daily work in great detail so they can be the best teachers of your company’s philosophy.

Principle 10. Develop exceptional people and teams who follow your company’s philosophy.

? Train exceptional individuals and teams to work within the corporate philosophy to achieve exceptional results. Work very hard to reinforce the culture continually.

? Use cross-functional teams to improve quality and productivity and enhance flow by solving difficult technical problems.

? Make an ongoing effort to teach individuals how to work together as teams toward common goals.

Principle 13. Make decisions slowly by consensus, thoroughly considering all options;

implement decisions rapidly (nemawashi).

? Nemawashi is the process of discussing problems and potential solutions with everyone affected, to collect their ideas and get agreement on how to move forward. This consensus process is time-consuming but broadens the search for solutions, and once a decision is made, implementation can move ahead rapidly.

Toyota’s elaboration on the Toyota Way principles on the corporate website describe how these principles support the company’s relations with employees.

TMC’s Relations with Employees

According to TMC’s website (http://www.toyota-global.com/sustainability/stakeholders/employees.html):

? The Toyota Way promotes mutual trust and respect between labor and management, long-term employment stability, and communication.

? The Toyota Institute conducts core training for affiliates worldwide, to teach work methods (problem solving and management expertise), so Toyota personnel around the world can put the shared Toyota Way into practice.

The May 23, 2011 NAQAP report questioned how effectively Toyota followed the Toyota Way principles. The criticisms that are most relevant to human resources management reveal flaws in the executive reporting structure, global communications structure, and safety management accountability.

The North American Quality Advisory Panel’s Findings

Management and organization analysts generally agree that the oversights that led to Toyota’s 2009-2010 recalls stemmed from Toyota setting its own sights, more than ten years earlier, on becoming the world’s largest automaker. Critics propose that the company’s focus on global expansion superseded management and employee structures, policies, and processes that the company required in order to keep balanced tabs on the internal and external environments. The NAQAP concurred, adding, “…the root causes of Toyota’s recent challenges go beyond the issue of growth. They are more complex and more subtle, and in many cases, are not unique to Toyota.”

Some of the root causes that the NAQAP cited are rooted in what were possibly misguided or mismanaged human resources strategy and management policies.

Executive reporting and decision-making structures

1. According to the NAQAP, Toyota structured its global operations around functional “silos,” each of which reported separately to TMC executives in Japan. Decision-making structures that involved everything from recalls, communications, marketing, and vehicle design and development were centrally managed and tightly controlled by TMC. In North America, instead of having one chief executive in charge of all of its divisions (e.g., sales and marketing, general corporate, engineering, and manufacturing), Toyota placed a separate head in each division, each of whom reported directly to TMC in Japan.

One-way communications

2. NAQAP suggested that Toyota’s global “silo” structure contributed to problems with yokoten, the part of Toyota’s process of continuous improvement that focuses on sharing best practices and transferring knowledge across the organization. For example, Toyota’s president, Akio Toyoda, said that the company “failed to connect the dots between problems” with sticking accelerator pedals in Europe and in the United States. A Toyota executive admitted to Congress that “a weakness in our system has been that within this company, we didn’t do a very good job of sharing information across the globe. Most of the information was one way. It would flow from the regional markets, like the United States, Canada or Europe back to Japan.” A case in point: in 2000 the United Kingdom recalled Lexus IS-200 models due to “a possibility that the driver’s side carpet mat may rotate around the central fixing and interfere with the operation of the accelerator pedal.” Toyota did not report this recall to North America counterparts. Had North America operations known about the mat and accelerator pedal problem, its specialists could have examined the related safety design issues before they became a widespread problem.

Safety management responsibility oversight

3. The NAQAP suggested that Toyota viewed safety as a subset of quality. As a result, Toyota did not have a senior executive level position with overall responsibility for safety, and did not appear to have a clear management chain of responsibility for safety issues. Although, from Toyota’s perspective, everyone at the company was responsible for safety, the NAQAP suggested that the diffused nature of this responsibility could have thwarted the company’s ability to recognize the need to accept responsibility when the public raised safety concerns.

Summary

Critics suggest that TMC’s strategy of aggressive growth played a significant factor in how the company mishandled safety concerns raised by U.S. customers who complained that their vehicles’ accelerator pedals stuck in an acceleration position. The NAQAP concluded that while they were focusing on global expansion and becoming the world’s top automotive manufacturer, TMC executive management (ironically) overlooked the need to redesign the executive reporting and communication structures and to centralize responsibility for safety, and they ignored key principles of the Toyota Way that would have led the company to investigate consumers’ and government regulators’ complaints sooner.

TMC’s executives’ slow response to customers and regulators who raised vehicle safety concerns (until the media took up the cause) suggests to some critics that Toyota management may have sacrificed Toyota Way principles to try to save money and face.

Questions

1. Based on “the three big strategic questions” of strategic HR (What is our present situation? Where do we want to go? How do we plan to get there?), and based on the information provided in this case, how well, in your opinion, did Toyota plan for global expansion back in 2000, in terms of executive reporting structure and corporate communication procedures? Was the structure too centralized and vertical, or not centralized and vertical enough? Should the North American affiliates have had more decision-making autonomy and/or horizontal communication paths? Should there have been more or fewer horizontal communication paths between different divisions and/or countries (e.g., England and the U.S.)? Explain your position. Reference Chapter Two – bring into academic data to correlate with the question.

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