SITUATIONAL ANALYSIS
In General Motors, the OB issues identified are poor organizational culture, poor leadership style and poor communication channels amongst the people in the organizations. The ignition switch recall which caused a great buzz in the media in 2014 was as a result of GM personnel’s incapability to address the ignition switch problem which continued for more than 11 years, representing a history of failures. These issues were known by relevant departments in GM such as engineers, investigators, managers and lawyers but the problem was never communicated to the highest level of management in the company. Every employee with knowledge of the issue had the responsibility to do something about it but nobody took responsibility, …show more content…
GM was rebuilding, contracting, outsourcing and removing expenses for the survival of the organization. It was then trailed by years of an "authoritative culture that prized cost over quality, hesitating to communicate bad news and perhaps overlooked a cover-up," (Himsel, 2014, para. 2). Fletcher and Mufson (2014, A01) point out that "the issue was a corporate culture hesitant to communicate bad news. The cost driven culture potentially caused employees who had knowledge about the ignition issue to not speak up. Over the past few years there has been issues regarding culture at General Motors where employees’ autonomy was threatened, employees at GM were faced with a culture where you get fired if you do talk about safety and quality issues, basically there was no freedom of opinion in the discharge of their …show more content…
Based on the internal investigations carried out by Anton Valukas, a U.S attorney, the production heads involved in the recent ignition recall crisis all denied having prior knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the recall.
This shows negligence on their part for permitting a quality control problem to go unnoticed for a long period of time. This also suggests a corporate environment that is driven by cost rather than quality and this nurtures the habit of reluctance to pass bad news to managers. This eventually led to poor crisis management.
The organization has also been criticized for being slow to take responsibility for problems and reluctant to fire poorly performing top management staff. Accountability and feedback via reporting lines are also flawed. Leaders failed to take ownership and this increased the lack of trust and transparency between managers and employees creating a disunity in the
In General Motors, the OB issues identified are poor organizational culture, poor leadership style and poor communication channels amongst the people in the organizations. The ignition switch recall which caused a great buzz in the media in 2014 was as a result of GM personnel’s incapability to address the ignition switch problem which continued for more than 11 years, representing a history of failures. These issues were known by relevant departments in GM such as engineers, investigators, managers and lawyers but the problem was never communicated to the highest level of management in the company. Every employee with knowledge of the issue had the responsibility to do something about it but nobody took responsibility, …show more content…
GM was rebuilding, contracting, outsourcing and removing expenses for the survival of the organization. It was then trailed by years of an "authoritative culture that prized cost over quality, hesitating to communicate bad news and perhaps overlooked a cover-up," (Himsel, 2014, para. 2). Fletcher and Mufson (2014, A01) point out that "the issue was a corporate culture hesitant to communicate bad news. The cost driven culture potentially caused employees who had knowledge about the ignition issue to not speak up. Over the past few years there has been issues regarding culture at General Motors where employees’ autonomy was threatened, employees at GM were faced with a culture where you get fired if you do talk about safety and quality issues, basically there was no freedom of opinion in the discharge of their …show more content…
Based on the internal investigations carried out by Anton Valukas, a U.S attorney, the production heads involved in the recent ignition recall crisis all denied having prior knowledge of the circumstances surrounding the recall.
This shows negligence on their part for permitting a quality control problem to go unnoticed for a long period of time. This also suggests a corporate environment that is driven by cost rather than quality and this nurtures the habit of reluctance to pass bad news to managers. This eventually led to poor crisis management.
The organization has also been criticized for being slow to take responsibility for problems and reluctant to fire poorly performing top management staff. Accountability and feedback via reporting lines are also flawed. Leaders failed to take ownership and this increased the lack of trust and transparency between managers and employees creating a disunity in the