Organizational Culture General Motors
General Motors is a multimillion company located in Detroit. The company operates in over 42 countries, and its major competitors include Nisan, Toyota, Audi, and Mercedes. GM is famous for its unique organizational culture. The company’s has a thriving corporate culture with solid components that enables it to maintain its competitive advantage. General Motors is the pioneer in outsourcing to the developing world. Currently, it has more than 1.5 employees distributed across its 42 countries of operation. More than 29 percent of the company’s products are made in China, while 44 percent are manufactured in Vietnam. Promoting employee welfare, diversity, global expansion, and innovation are some of the competitive advantages that General Motors has over its competitors. Besides, the company’s success in these areas is faced with new policies imposed on taxation by the current U.S administration (Briody, Pester & Trotter, 2012). The company now faces an average of 11 percent tariffs on cars imported into the U.S, with another threat of increasing the tax to 45 percent for goods exported from China. The company’s culture affects the political system, environment, economic development, culture, and the physical well-being of human beings in society around the globe. Through its culture, the company has managed to connect to its customers through the internet and even increase its customer base. The company can quickly sell its products to its customers from another country successfully. Besides, the company has also enhanced its operations by improving its transportation and telecommunication systems (Kaluarachchi, 2010). The company can make goods and distribute them all over the world to all its customers. The company’s transition from regional to global organizations has forced its leaders to manage people from diverse backgrounds, values, and work ethics. However, as the company focuses on innovating quality products, GE motors should also encourage creativity and thinking out of the box for its employees.
Creativity is a virtue that promotes the development of the new idea to improve the business and products. Creativity comes from the knowledge, abilities, and skills of employees. At GE, creativity will help the company to create new designs and features of automobiles. Through innovation, the company will be able to coordinate its operations effectively, and also, the employees will be given a platform to showcase their full potentials, abilities, skills, and expertise. Innovation is one of the leading competencies that is currently considered in any organization. Hiring employees who can think outside the box is a tremendous advantage for success in the constantly changing marketplace (Lee, Khong, Ghista & Rad, 2006). The rate of competition has reached its notch, and this presents a more significant risk for companies that still rely on the older management approaches that are not effective in the modern world. Various companies are currently thrown out of the market due to poor management and decision-making from multiple reports. Technology and innovation play a significant role in modern management. Organizations that are currently controlling larger market share in the automobile industry, such as Tesla, Mercedes, Ford, and Toyota, have a highly innovative workforce that comes up with new designs every day. General Motors will benefit from innovation in many ways. For example, the company will increase the complexity and heighten customer demand. It will transform its production style by introducing new technologies such as Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, big data analytics techniques to reduce production time and increase the efficiency and quality of its products (Prajogo & McDermott, 2005).
When the company adopts innovative ideas in its operational activities, it will improve the status of its products and the production environment. Apart from using new technological approaches in products such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and other analytics to drive automation and deliver insights that promote efficiency to accelerate product delivery, the company should also provide an enabling environment that allows employees to develop new ideas and designs. When employees are exposed to such an environment, the employees will think outside the box and even identify opportunities within the business. Creating a creative environment allows employees to apply their skills effectively and learn new ideas. It will also enable employees to feel free to share ideas and develop a good working relationship with another (Toliyat & Kliman, 2018). Ensuring good working relationships and effective communication are the cornerstone for an innovative workforce.
Thinking out of the box allows GE employees to explore the world and develop new ideas, designs, and features about their products. This helps the company to stay competitive. Organizational Culture General Motors
Innovation refers to the ability of adaptability and receptivity of a business unit to change. Besides, it can be defined as the willingness of employees to accept and consider the adoption of new ideas. Many reports indicate that the implementation of changes in organizations can be resisted by members of an organization, thus hindering the organization from improving its quality (Toliyat & Kliman, 2018). Innovations involve improving employees’ working environment to enhance their ability to deliver high-quality services in a clean environment. Innovative organizations are usually willing to experiment with new ideas. Such companies continuously evaluate market expectations and customer needs to create new products and enhance current production processes.
Despite the contributions of innovation to the implementation of quality management practices in General Motors, the company must consider the impact of quality management practices on innovation. Many researchers argue that besides other obstacles to change such as pricing, competition, lack of innovative ideas, and risk-averse environment, quality improvement is a crucial barrier to innovation. People barriers in an organization relate to the quality of communication and interaction in an organization critical to obtaining new ideas. The quality of communication needed in building the commitment required to implement the new ideas can also affect innovation in an organization. An organization must create a favorable environment that allows for the implementation of new ideas. Organizational Culture General Motors
When a member of an organization is punished continuously for making mistakes, they get demoralized. They become incapable of expressing their ideas because of fear or offer their suggestion to the management. In return, the organization can focus on measurement because they have un-ambitious goals due to a lack of corporation from employees (Wise, 2020). When General Motors adopt an innovative workforce, it will triumph over its competitors, such as Tesla, which is currently dominating the market and is steadily creeping into its strongholds. The company will attract many customers from its improved products, increasing its market share, returns, and brand loyalty.
Various concepts of organizational culture can help sustain and maintain GE Motors’ functionality. Some of these concepts include cultural competence and collaborative culture. The cultural competencies that General Motors currently embody are workplace diversity and workplace ethics. General Motors has been ranked as one of the leading organizations in workplace diversity. The organization currently has over 40 percent, female workers. The average age for the company employees is now forty years. The majority of the company employees are between the ages 25 and 60 (Warrick, 2017). The company has about 20 percent of employees from minority groups. Currently, the GE Motors branch in the U.S has over 20 percent of brown and black workers. In 2015, the company was ranked the best in promoting employee welfare. It was ranked top by the International Labor Organization in being the best company with low turnover and high employee retention. Organizational Culture General Motors
Currently, the opportunities that the company has are the diverse workforce. Some of the importance of cultural diversity in the workplace includes improved innovative ideas; cultural diversity has led to an expansion in talents and improved morale. Building on the company’s cultural diversity will enable it to enhance acceptance and respect and accommodate the beliefs that diverse workforce are equally important and critical to organizational success. Besides, the company will improve on communication, language barriers, generation gaps, and gender equality that might be barriers to effective service delivery (Prajogo & McDermott, 2005). Again, some of the factors that have facilitated cultural diversity in the company include putting internal company policies with clear regulations to prevent employees from demonstrating discrimination and prejudice on others. The inclusion of people with non-traditional educational backgrounds and people from other countries are the methods of talent identification that facilitate the company’s diversity and success. Inclusion of people of color and people of different age brackets like having older people, youths, and young adults are opportunities that the company should exploit for maximum production.
Conclusion
This paper has proposed creativity and thinking out of the box at GE Motors as an opportunity to enable it to align its culture to employee behavior. Aligning employees’ behavior, attitude, and beliefs is vital because it makes employees conform to the organizational culture. Creating a working environment that promotes creativity and allows employees to utilize their skills, expertise, and abilities is essential for the company’s success. GE Motors should consider using some new management techniques to become successful and develop a competitive advantage against its competitors. By promoting the welfare of employees, ensuring workplace diversity, globalization, technological use, and upholding ethics, the company will develop an advantage against its competitors and become more potent in the automobile industry.