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A powerful tool to analyze how organizations work - the NUMMI case
Understanding Ed Schein’s model on recognizing the organizational culture, and practicing on the case of NUMMI plant using that framework to identify the basic components of culture, the ways they may interact, and how well the different elements may be aligned.
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New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. (NUMMI) was an American automobile manufacturing company in Fremont, California, jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota that opened in 1984. Before NUMMI, the plant was under the control of General Motors that operated it between 1962 and 1982. Employees at the plant were considered the worst workforce in the automobile industry of the United States, and the joint venture of General Motors and Toyota took the challenge to turn it to a high-performing innovative scheme.
The concept of organizational culture provides a powerful tool to analyze how organizations work. If we’d like to decode an organization’s culture effectively, we must carefully observe below the level of their visible “Artifacts” that lie on the surface and remain easily noticeable by an external observer, and approach the levels of “Values”, which represent the espoused values of an organization’s culture, and “Basic Assumptions”, which lie at the core of the organizational…
