Creating Quality Cultures in the East and West

East and West differ significantly in terms of how people view leadership and ideal organization; because of this, they face different issues in creating the trust essential for a total quality (TQM) culture. Westerners must confront deeply rooted values of individualism, which influence not only employee attitudes to TQM, but also how managers interpret their leadership roles. Asians have somewhat different problems, especially expanding and exporting their more communal corporate culture. The better they understand the differences in their values, the more successfully will managers from East and West communicate with, and learn from, each other. The ideal of Europeans, and even more so, North Americans, is to minimize authoritarian control while maximizing individual autonomy and initiative. For the Westerner, the best leader is the "one-minute manager" who communicates clear goals and delegates decisions about how to implement them. The best organization is a fraternity of equals. This value system even influences technology design. I suspect it is One reason why, in the early 1980s, GM wasted hundreds of millions of dollars trying to automate final assembly at the Hamtramack, Michigan plant. At the time, GM managers indicated to me that they could not only save labor costs, but also rid themselves of a conflictful, unpleasant relationship with the assembly workers and their union. When this vision failed, idealists at GM put their hopes in the Saturn project in which union leaders co-manage the plant at Spring Hill, Tennessee. At Saturn, the issue of hierarchy is, to some degree, fudged by representative democracy. In contrast, Toyota has been slower to automate final assembly and has emphasized training for teams of workers led by managers in the role of teachers and team leaders. As a consultant to Volvo in the 1970! and '80s, I found the same Western yearning to do away with hierarchy and class differences. The Swedish ideal was the self-managed team of craftsmen and women, working without need for a boss. The assembly plant at Uddevalla was designed by a team of management and union leaders to realize this ideal, but Volvo decided that it did not achieve sufficient levels of productivity (an issue still being debated in Sweden.) In fact, the Volvo assembly plant with the best productivity was in Ghent, Belgium. There, the plant manager studied the Toyota approach and reorganized the plant according to this model. Swedish union leaders rejected the Toyota approach as oppressive. The high value Westerners place on individual autonomy typically leads to bureaucratic gridlock. Each individual tries to increase autonomy, and managers struggle for control over employees. In many companies, spontaneous teamwork resists the dictates of management, rather than focusing On satisfying customers, improving processes and cutting costs by driving out waste (i.e., anything that does not add value for customers). In the West, creating a TQM culture requires channeling individual self-interest toward quality goals and developing trust that individuals will not be exploited by working cooperatively. THE WESTERN IDEAL The Western vision of ideal organization and leadership stems from the historical struggle for individual rights and freedom from authoritarian domination. In most Western companies, the majority of employees--especially middle managers--are not compliant organization men. They attempt to maximize their autonomy and control of turf. The positive side of this is entrepreneurial initiative. The negative is political positioning and playing it safe. Asked by the CEO to cooperate across turf lines, Western employees, especially managers, calculate whether they will gain or lose by ceding control. While respect for Western leaders ebbs and flows according to their achievements, their followers expect these leaders to do what is necessary to maintain their own autonomy and success. …