Toyota's Political Perspective: Authority, Negotiation, Resistance

This essay provides a comprehensive political analysis of Toyota's organizational structure, focusing on authority, negotiation, and resistance to change. It explores the company's hierarchical structure, emphasizing the top-down approach and the role of managers in decision-making. The essay examines the concept of legitimate and expert power within Toyota, highlighting how these forms of power are derived from positions and expertise. It also delves into the company's low pluralistic approach, discussing the 'Toyota Way' and its impact on employee relations and unionization. The essay further analyzes the negotiation and bargaining processes within Toyota, particularly the lack thereof, and the impact of this on employee rights. Finally, it examines the resistance to authority within the company, considering cultural and political differences, and the impact of the Toyota Production System (TPS). The essay also touches on the company's policy on reporting unethical behavior. The analysis draws on various academic sources to support its arguments and provide a nuanced understanding of Toyota's political landscape.

Political Perspective
1
Toyota is a highly hierarchical organisation and has a line of authority that involves a top-down approach
where the worker reports to the supervisor, and he or she, in turn, takes orders from them. The Toyota
Production System entails a line of authority that gives the managers the responsibility to have a
consensus decision making within the organisation (Jones, Latham, & Betta 2013, p. 1631). However, it is
notable that despite this requirement, the company still gives the managers the absolute power of
making the decisions. Even though they are supposed to seek the views of workers in the input, they are
mandated to make the final say on the way forward (Besser 1996, p. 179). They still have the power to
overrule over the wishes of the subordinates despite being required to circulate information about
issues to their peers and the workers before making any ruling. This makes Toyota have a chain of
command. The decision-making prerogatives are associated with the positions in the organisation. The
line of authority is based on the rank that a person assumes in the company.
One type of power is legitimate power. This is derived from the virtue of the position an individual holds
in the company (Merchant 2019). The hierarchy of the organisation determines it. This means that it is
imperative for the junior managers to report to the senior ones while these report to directors.
Promotion is the only way of obtaining a legitimate power in such a company. In Toyota, the junior
workers have to report to their supervisors and give them the ability to assign them duties. The CEOs
also hold a legitimate power in the organisation (Besser 1996, p. 179). Managers are the decision-
makers in the organisation on issues, and this means that they wield a positional power. This type
cannot be faked as an individual has to earn it legitimately to use it. The other source of power in Toyota
is expert power which exists in possession of knowledge or expertise. Engineers and experts in different
fields are the ones who hold this power as they are the ones who understand the procedures of
production, and they influence the way the functions are carried out. This makes other subordinates to
follow them and in turn, make them have power.
2
Pluralism describes the co-existence of different parties or groups within an organisation that have
interests that are different from one another. According to Toyota’s management strategies, it is
imperative to note that the company exhibits a low pluralistic approach. The measure is based on the
presence of various groups and stakeholders that offer an influence on the decisions of the organisation.
While it is true that there are several in number, Toyota has its unique way of production and business
practices. The “Toyota Way” is one of these. It tends to combine the effect of the employees and make a
single unit of the workforce that follows the procedures of production to the latter (Liker & Hoseus
2008). The mere existence of such a system is a clear indication that the company has a single purpose,
values, and objectives. This means that every stakeholder has to be connected to it for the practices of
the organisation to run smoothly.
An indication of the unitarist approach that Toyota has is also seen in the move to adopt the Lean
system to every affiliate organisations around the world. This has come up from the customised process
known as the Toyota Production System (TPS). This describes the ideal standards and a guiding beacon
for the global management of the Toyota corporation. The recent years have seen the lean contributing
to the introduction of many management practices, including the just-in-time process, quality

management, and job rotation. The TPS has two pillars, one being the respect for people. Such would
mean that the company engages in a pluralistic environment where everyone’s input coexists with the
organisational norms. However, this is not the case for the Toyota affiliates. The TPS underscores the
Toyota Way, which maintains a strict set of core managerial beliefs and values which tend to make sure
that the entire global presence of the company follows the same things over and over. While this has led
to the increased organisational performance, it has also ensured that the company maintains a unitary
perspective as the management is the sole legitimate authority seen by the employees. Industrial
democracy in such settings are rarely extensive, and according to Graham (1995), do not extend beyond
workers being able to vote on some trivial things (p. 137). This has led to the absence of unions in the
Toyota manufacturing sites as the lean is profoundly opposed to them. The external voice of
stakeholders who would wish to make the company accountable is thus thwarted as can be seen in most
overseas affiliates which as union-free. An example is in Canada, where the United Steel Workers and
Canadian Auto Workers unions have failed severally to introduce the concept of pluralism.
3
Negotiations and bargaining are the two processes that are used to reach an agreement between two
groups or people. In an institutional perspective, it is the process through which the workers and the
management come into terms with the processes and procedures involved in the operations. Toyota
lacks extensive evidence of the bargaining and negotiation process in its essential events. If the Toyota
Way is anything to go by, it seems that the organisation respects the workers through its pillars of lean.
However, the company takes from the Japanese culture where the worker is a subordinate that is
supposed to follow directions without questioning authority. This means that the company has the
management taking most of the essential decisions unilaterally.
In the industrial field, unions are some of the most important sources of the bargaining power to the
workers. However, most of the Toyota firms are union-less, or for those that face inevitability, they are
arranged as internal bodies that are still subject to the directions of the management. Employees are
thus left with no choice of negotiations but to follow the decisions made by the managers. An example
of impaired decision-making in the company can be seen in the case of Toyota Philippines workers. After
a court granted the employees the rights to elect and form a legitimate union within the organisation in
2001, the management went ahead to thwart these plans. This was supposed to grant the Toyota Motor
Philippines Corporation Workers Association (TMPCWA) the right to be reinstated as the sole bargaining
agent for the workers (Brecher 2007). After this grant, the company management forcefully and
unlawfully retrenched 233 employees, among them the entire union executive committee. From this
scenario, it can be seen that Toyota does not want any form of negotiation from the workers.
However, there are elements of inclusive decision making in the company. This bears from the Japanese
culture where group work is the order and that no member should wield power over the others in such
situations. The TPS is also another guarantee for negotiations as it gives the employees the authorities
to make line decisions. If there is a problem in the front assembly line, the workers are empowered to
stop the manufacturing process. But still, the company has a sense of authoritarian control over its
decisions, with the bureaucratic organisational structure making it difficult for employees to actively
engage in the negotiation process as there are multiple silos.

4
Resistance to authority is one thing that many international corporations have to contend with. One of
the reasons is because of the cultural and political differences that exist between the host and the home
nations to the organisations. The globalisation approach that Toyota gave to the TPS was the tipping
point of the company. Just like in any other change, the employees were resistant to such authority. The
company was supposed to emulate and imitate the kind of management that was evident in the home
country of Japan. Such involved no unions, and workers wired to be obedient to authority without
questions. However, in its attempt to create an environment that resembles that in Japan has led to
increased resistance from the external parties.
One the source of such is the issue of the corporate culture. It is still a family business that is supposed
to be run as one. This means that the top management is purely based on people from the Japanese
culture (Liker & Convis 2012, p. 35). For instance, in the US, the executives are assigned individuals from
Japan to supervise their works and decisions. The company is highly hierarchical. Such a political
formation may lead to a covert type of resistance. Notably, it can be seen that the employees have
engaged in resistance through distance. This can be seen in the handling of the recall crisis of 2009,
which saw about 10 million Toyota Lexus vehicles being taken back for problems arising from self-
acceleration. The workers of the US plant covered the information about the defective accelerators due
to the silos present. Someone would have spoken up before the problem became entrenched in such a
vast scale. Despite the TPS claiming to increase worker involvement, it is clear that this was a source of
resistance as the company had a political culture where the power distance was high from its Japanese
culture (Daft 2006).
The second source of resistance is the overt one. Toyota’s management is highly autocratic with limited
negotiations left for the workers. Thus, in countries where the culture is different, the company faces
union action and worker strike. An example is seen in the unrest faced in India (Rapoza 2014) and South
Africa (Roelf 2018) and the failure and delay in implementing lean in Australia (James 2019). Toyota
attempted to make lean the default setting in firms around the world. This encountered stiff opposition
from the unions around the company. These bodies claimed that TPS is a tool for control that makes the
employees stretched to the maximum and curtail their freedoms (Jones, Latham, Betta, & Liu 2008). This
led to the union actions against the company and leading to strikes in the Philippines, South Africa, and
India.
5
Toyota has some form of policy that allows an individual to report unethical behaviour from a person
apart from them in the organisation (Toyota 2017). The program ensures that the person is offered a
channel of confidentiality to report a severe issue to the company heads. However, it is not clear
whether the organisation protects the whistleblower as it does not give clear guidelines on the event
that they have to report to the external authorities. Toyota encourages the employees to report the
matter to the immediate supervisor or manager, raising the silos as some of these people may not take
the reports to the management (Toyota 2017).

References
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of the Toyota recall crisis. Journal of Organization Design, 5(1), p.4.
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Graham, L 1995, On the line at Subaru-Isuzu: The Japanese model and the American worker. Cornell
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