For more than six decades, Toyota Motor Corporation has been a shining example of employee collaboration and teamwork. Although many companies proudly proclaim their team culture, at Toyota, the endorsement seems well deserved and sincere. Teamwork is one of Toyota’s core values, along with trust, continuous improvement, long-term thinking, standardization, innovation, and problem solving. In addition, four management principles (the 4P model) guide employees: problem solving, people and partners, process, and philosophy. The idea behind these principles is that “Good Thinking Means Good Product.” Another interesting detail about Toyota is its belief that efficiency alone cannot guarantee success. The company recognizes that teams of employees are more than several pairs of hands but represent chie–the wisdom of experience. For supervisors the question is, how does Toyota’s culture reflect its emphasis on teamwork? ZUMA Press, Inc./Alamy First, individualism, a prominent value in Western culture, is deemphasized. Instead, Toyota emphasizes systems in which people and processes and products are seen as intertwined value streams. Employees are trained to be problem solvers with an important responsibility to make the production system leaner and better. Second, Toyota’s hiring process “weeds out” those who aren’t oriented to teamwork. Job applicants must not only be competent and possess technical skills, but must exhibit strong teamwork capabilities such as being able to trust their team, comfortable with solving problems collaboratively, and motivated to achieve collective outcomes. Third, Toyota structures its work around teams. Every Toyota employee knows the adage, “All of us are smarter than any of us.” Teams are used not only in production, but at every level and in every function. For instance, in the aftermath of the devastating tsunami, employees at Toyota GB (the corporate sales and marketing arm of Toyota and Lexus brands in the United Kingdom) all pulled together with a “team spirit of personal sacrifice to guarantee the stable employment of the collective.” Finally, Toyota considers employee teams to be the power center of the organization. The leader serves the team, not the other way around. When asked whether he would feature himself in an advertisement, the former CEO of Toyota USA said, “No. We want to show everybody in the company. The heroes. Not one single person.”
Has Toyota succeeded because of its team-oriented culture, or could it have succeeded without it?
How does Toyota emphasize teamwork throughout the organization?
How would the way supervisors manage be different in this team-based organization?
Would you be comfortable working in such an environment at this? Why or why not?