To compete effectively on a global basis with the likes of Toyota and Volkswagen. there been a

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To compete effectively on a global basis with the likes of Toyota and Volkswagen. there been a necessary shift in the nature of what constitutes effective job performance at General motors. Hints at this change in emphasis can be seen on the company's corporate website where Its new guiding principles are highly visible and clearly stated. These principles let employees know that their job performance not only involves carrying out the core tasks they were hired to do—designing, assembling, and selling vehicles—but also doing these tasks in ways that promotes safety, customer satisfaction, innovation, shareholder value, and social responsibility. Of course, true change in an organization takes inure than just revising a corporate website. So what else might indicate GM's commitment to the company's turnaround?

One sign that the company is serious about change is CEO Dan Akerson's regularly held "town hall meetings" with his employees. He not only has been pressing them to embrace change, focus on customers. and behave with integrity—he has also been warning them that. if they can't play by this new set of rules, they should look for work elsewhere. Akerson has also indicated a sharp break from GM's long-standing tradition of strong centralized corporate control and micromanagement. How has he done this! He now praises plant employees who demonstrate proactivity in their job performance in order to make changes and fix problems. He has promised to cut red tape and streamline management to encourage this type of proactive performance. and he has urged employees to fix problems when they see something wrong and not to worry about asking for permission first.

Other signs that the revitalization at General Motors is genuine involve changes to the company's management practices. For example, consider the steps the company has taken to develop creativity and urgency of engineers who need to introduce fresh new vehicles into the marketplace at an improved pace. Traditionally, engineers worked long-term product development cycles involving high levels of structure, control, and routine. Engineers are now rotated through GM's racing teams for a season so that they can learn how to perform in a context where problem solving is quicker and more fluid.

In racing, there's less information and time available, and as a consequence, engineers learn to become more comfortable making decisions based on their gut feelings and experience, rather than on an exhaustive analysis of data and consideration of benefits and costs from every conceivable vantage point, so that the best compromise can be reached.

General Motors is willing to accept that some decisions will be wrong, however: decisions will be made quicker, and perhaps more important, knowledge gained from bad decisions can be used to inform better future decisions. How well will this practice work? Although it is difficult to predict, the 20 new vehicles that General Motors introduced in 2012 compare favorably to the 19 that its chief rival Toyota introduced in 2011.

2.1 Which dimensions of job performance do you think General Motors emphasized prior to its revitalization effort? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this emphasis? How did this emphasis likely contribute to the company's problems?