Elizabeth K. Briody

A story's impact on organizational‐culture change

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to explain the successful implementation of organizational applications, and ensuing organizational change, based on a story from a GM manufacturing plant.Design/methodology/approach – The approach involved collecting and analyzing the Hoist Story as part of a multi‐year ethnographic research project designed to identify the key attributes in an ideal plant culture. Through a cooperative process of co‐production, the authors worked in tandem with organizational members on issues related to organizational‐culture change.Findings – The findings emphasize both the Hoist Storys process impact and outcome impact. The Hoist Story was a catalyst for the change process, resulting in a high level of buy‐in across the organization; as such it contrasts with much of the management literature on “planned change.” It also led to the development of several “packaged products” (e.g. a story script, video, collaboration tools) which propelled GM manufacturing culture closer to its i...

Ritual as Work Strategy: A Window into Organizational Culture

Learning in cooperation and/or collaboration with others is embedded in many higher education settings. Research on learning communities of various types often focuses on academic performance and pedagogical and curriculum enhancements. Our intent was to explore the cultural aspects of peer-to-peer collaboration. We apply the analytic lens of ritual to understand how engineering majors manage this “betwixt and between” phase of their lives prior to graduation. Our ethnographic and survey data go beyond confirming the emergence of “communitas” (an egalitarian and collaborative community spirit) among these undergraduates, to examine its value, how it works, and why it is sustained. We argue that students learn and adopt various work strategies, many of which are collaborative efforts, in response to the engineering schools organizational culture. This research raises options for new collaborations to transform the organizational culture while enhancing student performance and the college experience.

Introduction to the American Manufacturing Culture Story

The modern automotive assembly plant is a wonder; in fact, tours— virtual or real—of assembly plants are popular features of Disney’s Epcot Theme Park and The Henry Ford Museum. Thousands of parts from a vast array of suppliers arrive daily, often in the precise quantity and sequence that will be needed during that day or even that hour. Workers at hundreds of stations wield sophisticated, specialized tools to put those parts into systems and subsystems and integrate them with vehicle underbodies and sheet metal. The metal parts are welded by advanced robots and painted in high-technology booths using cutting-edge chemicals and processes. The final products that emerge are often beautiful and symbolic dream machines, as memorialized in countless songs, but are also increasingly electronic marvels with chips controlling everything from engine performance, to braking, to satellite communications. Despite being produced with a dizzying variety of body styles, models, options, and colors on a single assembly line, vehicle quality is at levels far above a generation ago.

Significant Cultural Transformations in the Automotive Industry

The manufacturing history of Europe, the United States, and the world is an intertwined flow of cultural transformations. Understanding the broad sweep of those transformations is an excellent way to explore current patterns because any cultural transformation has three elements that define it, explain it, and predict where it will end up. These elements are a history, a present configuration, and future potential. A famous aphorism states, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” In both the social sciences and in most human relationships, the things a person has done in the past are often the best predictors of future behavior. Unfortunately, being the best predictor is not necessarily synonymous with being a reliable predictor, only the most reliable predictor we have. People, cultures, and environments can change in unanticipated directions that make the future less certain.

Reliance on Cultural Processes during Cultural Transformation

The literature on deliberate or planned cultural change, development, and innovation provides a valuable set of guidelines for identifying both the barriers to innovation and change (as demonstrated in Chapter 5) and the conditions or processes that increase the probability that directed change will achieve its goals successfully.1 Some of the key elements of planned change depend on the definition of culture being used to direct the cultural change (e.g., a focus on behavior vs. a focus on ideas),2 while others depend on the interplay between cultural change and the psychology of change.3

Tools to Aid in Cultural Transformation

The Ideal Plant Culture project was a highly interactive process engaging our research group, the research sponsors and advocates, and the study participants. We shared what we were learning with the newly appointed plant manager of the greenfield plant and his Joint Leadership Team. In exchange, we received feedback and new directions for the research, which was compatible with a community-based participatory research approach1 in which researchers and manufacturing-community members are partners in the research. As the feedback process intensified, our research group began developing prototypes of applications, or tools, that could assist manufacturing leaders in conceptualizing and planning for the culture of the new plant. The development of these tools, or “actions,” was aligned with the tradition of action anthropology.2 Manufacturing leaders from both the greenfield plant and from a senior group of U.S.-based manufacturing managers worked with us intensively to test and implement the tools.

Obstacles to Cultural Transformation

Our research group used the classic and current “cultural change” or cultural transformation literature as a starting point to create a framework for understanding the obstacles that GM would encounter in the process of moving from the “old way” to a more ideal plant culture model.1 Any form of cultural change, from sweeping cultural revolutions to small changes in material culture, always meets some level of resistance. In general, people automatically resist change and favor continuity even when the new way may be more beneficial to them. The resistance can be mild and can be overcome by simply learning about the new way, or it can be vehement and virtually unchangeable, requiring the strongest tools of cultural change to encourage the adoption of the new way.2 Mild forms of cultural change are often called “evolutionary change” because they follow a step-by-step (i.e., small or incremental) progression from the old to the new. More sweeping and abrupt forms of cultural change are sometimes labeled “revolutionary change.” Those changes usually signal a significant break between the old and the new, especially in terms of the ideology or philosophy that is guiding the new way of doing things.3

Getting Organizations to See “What Is” and “What Could Be”

Our original charge was to determine how American manufacturing culture could be transformed to take advantage of the positive relationships that had been described as working well in other GM locations, such as Mexico. Our approach was to conduct a study of GM manufacturing sites and organize our key findings, making sure they were valid and reliable. While we developed our core set of findings, we also identified general (or generic) and locally specific obstacles to organizational-culture change, along with the positive elements of the culture (e.g., ideals, processes, relationships) that would assist in transforming the culture and maintaining that transformation. Since we were investigating a complex cultural system, we chose a basic ethnographic research approach1 for the research design. Ethnography is well suited to discovery and to the exploration of both culture as a whole and culture in particular detail2 and has proven to be useful in organizational research.3

Helping Organizations to See “What Was” and “What Is”

One member of our research group, Elizabeth Briody, had the unique experience of conducting anthropological fieldwork in GM manufacturing plants at two different points in time: the mid-1980s (as a sole researcher) and the mid-2000s (as a research-group leader).1 She did so from the standpoint of an “insider” (a full-time GM researcher) whose job was to design and conduct organizational-culture research. In each case, the research approach was exploratory and inductive. The focus was on understanding GM’s manufacturing culture generally, including the ways work was organized and coordinated and the ways plant personnel perceived that culture. The methods used in the two studies were the basic research methods used in ethnographic research (e.g., interviews, observation). The plants involved were located in Michigan. Thus, there were some important baseline similarities in the two research designs.

Lessons Learned, Futures Planned

In this book we have explored about one hundred years of cultural transformations within automotive manufacturing. We examined major shifts in the structure and dynamics of work in the United States, emphasizing especially the contrasts between mass production and flexible and lean production. We developed two models of cultural transformation—one focusing on the elements of cultural adaptiveness, cultural responsiveness, and cultural problem solving, and the other that uses the metaphor of a bridge to focus on organizational-culture-change processes. We described a consensus-based cultural ideal for GM’s manufacturing culture that identifies one possible model for GM as it heads into its future. We also introduced a set of tools that GM and other U.S.-based organizations can use to facilitate the change process where change in collaboration, cooperation, and relationships are needed. Each of these aspects of manufacturing culture has the potential to yield benefits not only for GM and other U.S. manufacturing organizations but also for other U.S. organizations as well. Our focus in this chapter is to consider the lessons from this study of manufacturing culture and the ways in which those lessons are applicable to issues of cultural transformation in the American workplace.