General Motors Company Case Study Paper Example

Section I: An Overview of the Company

General Motors settled in the United States of America is one of the re-known giants in the automobiles industry in the world. This is following the huge market that they run in the world today and their sound innovation that they are associated with, which tend towards environmental conservation as well as user-friendliness. The company has been engaging in several mergers and acquisitions including with Delphi, Detroit, and Chrysler to enable them to maintain its leading position in this industry. Recently, the company made a strategic acquisition with the Cruise Company. Cruise Company deals in the technological development to come up with automated driven vehicles, and therefore will enable General Motors to bring the new technology into their market, and improve their levels of dominance in the market (Mintz, 2007). The company will improve their might in the market as the new acquisition will enhance more safety in addition to the fact that they deal in vehicles, which are fuel conservative, and hence causes minimal pollution to the environment. This new merger acquisition will also add satisfaction to the consumers of their vehicles as the costs will be much cut, especially in the transport environment. The merger acquisition will ensure that the company improves its competitiveness in the market thus its growth, making it a strategic move for the company. Since the company is currently working on a strategy to deliver their customers from the energy stress by finding alternatives for fuel and designing fuel-conserving engines, it is evident that they are concerned with both the conveniences of their customers through enhancing efficiency of their products as well as concern for the environment by minimizing pollution from their vehicles. Their strategies are in this case in the favor of the world goals of finding alternatives for oil that is rapidly depleting. Considering the size, General Motors might in the world extend to over 210000 workers by 2015 across the world.

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In the 1990s, the company had many struggles in balancing between their goals and human resource requirements. The issue was however solved when the managers if the company transformed to strategic goal from their former operation model, which was productive, oriented. This strategy involves making the employees the major asset of the company (Yang, 2014). The motor company has today set training institutions in the countries that they operate in the bid to get their employees enrolled and trained about their goals so that recruiting issues are eliminated. By letting the employees who are enrolled I their schools about the company affairs, General Motors his managing the pressures that arise from employees who are only strict about their requirements and mindless about the fairing of their employers, who is the company. Through education of the employees, the automobile company has managed to get the best-recruiting employees whereby their employees have widely diverse skills enabling their innovative nature of the operation to flourish to higher levels. The company also get the opportunity to train specialized skills to employees who have been tested and confirmed to be working best in the particular field. This can be said to be a contributing factor to their high performing workers in specialized areas of the whole process (Nolan, 2008). The company is also keen on employee engagement strategies and is applying it as one of the tools to ensure company success. Management change is the second tool that the company is using widely to enhance their success in the market. The company works by evaluating and ensuring the use of appropriate management skills and behaviors among their leaders. By doing research on the currently performing managements skills, General Motors' has been able to identify and recommend on areas that the managers need to make some adjustments. The company, therefore, has the best management approaches to issues that affect their operations either positively or negatively (Shanmugaraja, 2012). Their managers are unique in that they are ready for adapting to any change, making it convenient to operate in both the lines of Human Resource requirements as well as company resource management. The company has also widely involved human resource managers when setting their strategic goals so that issues arising are minimized.

Section II: Kotter's change model

In Kotter's model, there is an eight-step that a company can use to realize a change. The steps include creation, building, forming, enlisting, generating sustaining, and instating. The company will address the first step which is of creating by coming up with aspects that need reviewing and changing and presenting them to the managers (Nolan, 2008). The building, which is the second step, will be addressed by bringing together the various departments of the company to stay focused despite the interruption brought by the change. Management will from there crate visions and incentives that are necessary to impact on the changes that will be done in the place (Salman, 2017). This is because the change is meant to have an effect on the general output of the company irrespective of the department in which the need for change originated. Once the visions have been made, a team of volunteers with members from all the company departments is selected to work on the implementation of the change in timely basis (Gill, 2012). The team will have the opportunity to get accessed to the data concerning the change without any form of restrictions, modify the suggested changes and also eliminate the changes which are identified to be having limitations to the company operations. Once the group has done the implementation and made necessary changes and test their workability, the changes will be made part of the company policies to aid in the regulation of the company operations.

Section III: Resistance and communication

Ineffective communication from either within or even outside the company causes a lot of resistance during the process of change (Mintz, 2007). Most of the organizational operation, as a result, makes it difficult to incorporate the technological changes that have been introduced. At General Motors, employees are the ones who give the slowest response to changes. This is because they fear that the technology changes introduced may result in them losing their jobs. However, the company has an effective communication strategy approach for this issue, which enables them to make clear the importance of the anticipated changes to employees such that understanding is arrived at the resistance barriers to change from the employees is eliminated (Dobosz-Bourne, 2006). Moreover, the company tends to involve all the concerned members when making the changes as a way of preventing any form of negative impact on them. To arrive at the most effective communication strategies such as conducting a survey to collect opinions on the concerned individuals so that they can provide their points of view to the change so that all the arising issues are addressed in time so that they do not cause any form of inconveniences during the implementation of the change policies. Effective communication during an organizational change management is also effective in creating the good rapport that is required for the creation of a good working environment. During organizational change with effective communication engaged, the company departments will be at the best coordination position and will manage to come up with the best measures taken into action. Communication, therefore, serves a core role in the organizational change management process. Each company should, therefore, put it a priority when going through the challenging process of organizational change and its management. All forms of resistance that a change may face can only be solved by proper communication into action.

Section IV: Recommended Strategies for Sustaining Change

Six-Sigma strategy

The first appropriate strategy for sustaining a change in a company is with the Six-Sigma, whereby customer satisfaction is given priority in the production process through providing standardized quality items for the customers (Jacoby, 2013). The steps in this strategy includes problem definition, coming up with measures for the impact of the problem, assessing situations through use of necessary methods to find out about the weight of impact the problem can cause to the company final output, using the change policies to improve the system and controlling the taking control measures such that an adjustment can be done in case there arises a need. This strategy would, therefore, enable the company to develop a change management plan having understood the cause of the problem that is in the company. The plan developed is, therefore, most effective as all the possible issues that may arise that are related are countered in the new plan. The six-sigma strategy is therefore cost-effective because there will serve the company on a long-term basis.

The SUCCESS Strategy

The second method that can be used involves sponsoring, understanding, committing, connecting, enabling, supporting, and sustaining the change (SUCCESS) (Greener, 2006). These strategies are important for ensuring that the company keeps within the track of their initial plan and maintain good relationships between the internal and external environments of the business. The strategies also minimize the cases where a company gets involved in malpractices as they often plan for everything that they take part in. through the strategies, companies can go beyond to serve the corporate roles to the society such as constructing institutions as well as develop a smooth operation whose end result is great outputs with little struggle to maintain the factors that surround company operations. Just as for the six-sigma strategy for approaching a change in an organization, the SUCCESS strategy bases all the solutions to a company issues on their courses. By enabling the organization to understand the cause of their issues, the solution approach will be at the position of countering all the possible related issues. A long-term service solution will, therefore, be developed. Expenditures dedicated by the company to handle problems will be reduced and the company will have the opportunity to develop even higher.

References

Gill, R. (2012). Change management--or change leadership?. Journal Of Change Management, 3(4), 307-318. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/714023845

Greener, T. & Hughes, M. (2006). Managing change before change management. Strat. Change, 15(4), 205-212. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/jsc.762

Dobosz-Bourne, D. & Jankowicz, A. (2006). Reframing resistance to change: experience from General Motors Poland. The International Journal Of Human Resource Management, 17(12), 2021-2034. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09585190600965431

Mintz, B. (2007). The Struggle for Control of the Modern Corporation: Organizational Change at General Motors, 1924-1970. Contemporary Sociology: A Journal Of Reviews, 36(2), 151-152. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/009430610703600222

Jacoby, G. (2013). Personnel Practices at GENERAL MOTORS. Vocational Guidance Quarterly, 1(3), 2-4. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/j.2164-585x.1953.tb01330.x

Nolan, S. (2008). Realizing efficiencies through HR policies and practices. Strategic HR Review, 7(2). http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/shr.2008.37207baa.001

The struggle for control of the modern corporation: organizational change at General Motors, 1924-1970. (2001). Choice Reviews Online, 38(11), 38-6270-38-6270. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/choice.38-6270

Yang, C. (2014). An integrated model of TQM and GE-Six-Sigma. IJSSCA, 1(1), 97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1504/ijssca.2004.005280Shanmugaraja, M., Nataraj, M., & Gunasekaran, N. (2012). Total performance e...