General Motors Poland.pdf

Int. J. of Human Resource Management 17:12 December 2006 2021 – 2034

Reframing resistance to change: experience

from General Motors Poland

Dorota Dobosz-Bourne and A. D. Jankowicz

Abstract This paper describes the successful introduction of a kaizen scheme in a

General Motors factory plant in Gliwice, Poland. Employee value systems changed,

despite the presence of strong, pre-existing values that might have inhibited this process.

These ﬁndings are drawn on to examine the concept of ‘resistance to change’ and replace it

with a notion of ‘functional persistence’. Our case study illustrates how assuming this

position can aid the development of new work attitudes, as opposed to constraining the old

ones.

Keywords Resistance to change; knowledge transfer; post-command economy; personal

values.

A background to work attitudes in Poland

Until 1989, Poland operated as a command economy that had its goals politically

determined by the monopoly of a national communist party taking many of its priorities

from Moscow (Kostera, 1996). In an economy of shortage with overwhelming customer

demand, industrial production aimed at maximizing supply within a centrally controlled

system that discouraged consideration of standards and quality at the point of

production/service delivery (Dobosz and Jankowicz, 2002). Closed borders and the

central allocation of production goals and resources eliminated competition from outside

of the Soviet bloc. Consequently management functions such as quality management, cost

control and marketing, were underdeveloped in the Polish economy (Kozminski, 1993).

The political nature of command economy operations strongly inﬂuenced the

development of Polish employees and managers during the communist years. Career

progression was severely limited for the 25 per cent of managers who, by the end of the

command period, were not members of the Nomenclatura list of previously vetted

members of the Polish United Workers’ Party (Szalkowski and Jankowicz, 2004).

Managers learned to avoid responsibility and risk, and developed networking and

political inﬂuence skills (Jankowicz, 2001; Obloj, and Kostera, 1994). However, this led

to conﬂict between people from different levels within the organizational hierarchy. As

the managerial role was largely conditional on party membership, Polish managers were

perceived as representatives of the system and its regime. This led to antagonism

between the workers and managers, and ‘them versus us’ behaviours emerged (Kostera,

1996). Mistrust of the system and a growing willingness to beat it were additionally

Dorota Dobosz-Bourne, Lecturer, School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of

London, London E1 4NS, UK (e-mail: d.dobosz-bourne@qmul.ac.uk); A. D. Jankowicz, Professor

of Constructivist Managerial Psychology, Luton Business School, University of Luton, Park

Square, Luton LU1 3JU, UK (e-mail: Devi.jankowicz@luton.ac.uk).

The International Journal of Human Resource Management

ISSN 0958-5192 print/ISSN 1466-4399 online q 2006 Taylor & Francis

http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09585190600965431

2022 The International Journal of Human Resource Management

reinforced by resentment, passivity and a mistrust of authority, values characteristic of

the Soviet style of management and its outcomes (Zaleska, 1998). Tischner (1992: 161,

present authors‘ translation) describes this attitude well: ‘Homo Sovieticus: chronically

suspicious, full of sour demands, unable to take responsibility or to commit himself, ever

ready to wallow in his own misery and misfortune.’

Prior to the explicit revolts of the 1980s, covert rebellion against the regime

demonstrated itself in Polish enterprises as a lack of discipline, commitment and orderly

progress – a rebellion, somewhat paradoxically, reinforced by government policy on

unemployment reduction and the fact that, under communism, the government

guaranteed everyone a job (Bednarzik, 1990).

Despite the government efforts to create an illusion of economic prosperity and social

equality in the Soviet bloc, Polish people inevitably compared the economic

achievements of the command economy with those of the West.

The constant close contact with other cultures, historically imposed, results in ambiguous

attitudes: for example, an admiration of Prussian efﬁciency clashes with the fact that for many

years, sabotage and not efﬁcient work was a patriotic virtue ... Looking at other countries, Poles

tend to attribute their successes to what is lacking in the ‘Polish character’: order, efﬁciency,

method. Therefore, the system is a myth. (Czarniawska, 1986: 15)

Comparing themselves with the West, the Poles developed a perception that a free

market economy was a foolproof recipe for a prosperous and luxurious existence so

the enthusiasm and hope for dramatic change which exploded in the country after the

collapse of communism in 1989 was understandable. Poland wanted to transform its

economy into a free market and effectively catch up with the West (Kozminski, 1993).

An approach to the identiﬁcation of values in multicultural cooperation

The changes of the 1990s and expansion of the European Union created numerous

possibilities for cooperation between Western and Eastern Europe. The emerging

markets attracted the attention of foreign investors, General Motors among them.

Clearly, the arrival of multinational companies would not always lead to a smooth

implementation of Western managerial practices and their subsequent economic success,

since the interaction between local workforce and foreign investors was inevitably going

to be affected by the cultural differences between the two groups. The values brought to

any multicultural collaboration by both sides determine the outcome of this process since

they govern action (Balnaves and Caputi, 1993) and the choices between more and less

preferred action that lead to institutionalization (Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996). Thus a

consideration of relevant values in the cultures involved in international cooperation, and

the extent to which these values differ as a function of the ‘cultural distance’ (Barkema

et al., 1996) between the cooperating organizations, is especially important for the

successful implementation of new management ideas.

In research on managerial values, particular values have traditionally been represented

as points or locations along a number of cultural dimensions, as identiﬁed by such

authors as Hofstede (1991) and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997). While this

approach to the study of values speciﬁes value dimensions as a helpful ﬁrst

approximation, it does not necessarily indicate the consequences for behaviour. This

broad-brush approach creates a generalist deﬁnition of values at the societal level

(Gesteland, 1999 exempliﬁes the insights possible) that does not, however, necessarily

reﬂect the particular personal values held by the individuals involved. In-depth

understanding at the personal level is important – Jankowicz (1996) provides instances

Dobosz-Bourne and Jankowicz: Reframing resistance to change 2023

of the way in which similar behaviour in different cultures may stem from different

values, and vice-versa: differing behavioural consequences drawn from similar personal

values. Therefore, in this paper we use a particular combination of qualitative and

quantitative research techniques (Kiessling and Harvey, 2005) to identify values at both

social and individual level.

If it is the case that sociologists have neglected the impact of individual differences

on the social phenomena being observed, (Schein, 1996) while psychologists have

ignored the traditions of sociologists and anthropologists, who observe a phenomenon at

length and in depth before trying to understand it, it would appear important to use

techniques that focus on individual perspectives in depth without trivializing them. In

the present study, the repertory grid technique (Kelly, 1955) provides the former, while

extended observation and ethnographic interviews conducted in situ provide the latter,

the two together resulting in a richer and more precise picture than a more generalist

dimension-based approach to cultural values might offer. Kelly’s technique focuses on

constructs rather than concepts, a construct being a distinction that a person makes in

order to make sense of an issue. Importantly for our purposes constructs are always

expressed in the form of contrasts – in identifying our respondents’ priorities, we were

able to examine what each person values, but also, what s/he choose not to value by

behaving in a particular way (Fransella, 1995: 57–8). The combination of the two

approaches works well: unthreatening in its approach, the ethnographic interview builds

an atmosphere of mutual interest, afﬁnity and closeness without excessive intrusion into

the interviewee’s privacy, preparing the way for an in-depth grid-based assessment of

personal values that many people might otherwise feel threatened by without such

preparation.

The ethnographic interview has a long tradition in knowledge transfer research

(Rogers, 1995) but the repertory grid may need some further description at this point. We

used it in three stages. In the ﬁrst, interviewees’ personal constructs were elicited by

asking each person to focus on, and recognize important similarities in and differences

between, critical incidents (Flanagan, 1954) in their working life. Examples of such

constructs might be: ‘This incident was exciting and challenging, whereas in contrast,

these were dull, a matter of practicing standard operating procedures’; or ‘These

incidents were due to the expatriate managers’ misunderstanding of local custom and

practice, while these, in contrast, were due to the Polish employees’ misunderstanding of

the intentions behind the changes being introduced.’

In the second stage, each interviewee was asked to indicate the personal value

underlying each construct, by an iterative process (‘laddering’) that seeks to identify the

reasons underlying the preference choices implicit in each construct. (Thus, a construct

‘Conscientious timekeeping, (as opposed to) Constant late attendance at work’ might

result in a value ‘Order (as opposed to) Chaos’ given that, for this interviewee, being a

conscientious timekeeper is about being reliable; reliability is important because with it,

one can predict and keep track of events; and prediction is important because, without

it, Order dissolves into Chaos.)

Finally, for each interviewee, each item in the set of personal values derived in this

way was compared in a forced-choice technique to result in a prioritized list of personally

more central, and less central, core values. Jankowicz (2003) describes these and related

techniques in detail.

The empirical work was carried out in two divisions of General Motors, the Vauxhall

Luton plant in England and the Opel Polska plant in Gliwice, Poland. The ethnographic

interviews, followed by the three-step repertory grid process outlined above, were done

with 30 managers as key informants (Tremblay, 1982), 16 British, two German, and 12

2024 The International Journal of Human Resource Management

Polish, these last having been trained by the English ones. All were chosen because of

their direct and extensive involvement in the process of knowledge transfer from

England to Poland when the Opel Polska plant was set up on a greenﬁeld site in 1996.

The individual grid information was used to supplement and amplify the individual

ethnographic account as outlined above; additionally, all constructs were pooled to

provide an aggregated picture of the constructs and values among all 30 interviewees.

This was done by a content analysis of the 211 constructs obtained from all 30

interviewees, using a boot-strapping procedure (Honey, 1979; Jankowicz, 2003) in which

an acceptably high researcher reliability was achieved. Categorization and coding by two

researchers working independently gave a ﬁnal result of 79 per cent agreement, Cohen’s

kappa for this analysis being 0.77, with a high and stable Perrault–Leigh reliability index

of 0.86, (the 0.5 per cent conﬁdence interval on the latter being 0.024). Personal values

were aggregated using a similar procedure.

Giving a meaning to kaizen in Opel Polska

In developing the greenﬁeld site at Gliwice, General Motors followed their normal

practice of using the original Japanese terms (kaizen, andon and gemba) for the quality

development and improvement procedures which, together with TQM practices,

suggestion schemes, policy deployment procedures, some localized problem-solving

techniques (Nowak, 2005) and general procedural standardization across the whole plant,

made up their integrated approach to vehicle assembly. Kaizen may be based on an

incremental paradigm (Proctor et al., 2004), but General Motors used the Japanese term

rather than some Polish translation, as a blunt and deliberate signal that new ways of

thinking were required. More subtly, the lack of pre-existing associations to the initially

meaningless foreign term provided a clear ﬁeld in which new and more desirable

associations might be formed – a clean slate, as it were.

Several stages, involving three distinct groups of people, were involved in the

elaboration of meaning that followed. We draw on the ethnography ﬁrst before drawing

on the repertory grid ﬁndings on values.

One group consisted mainly of British managers, all with previous experience from

Toyota or Nissan in Japan and the UK, responsible for starting up the plant and

introducing kaizen to Poland. The second consisted of Polish supervisors selected

according to general ability and an openness to new concepts, with an average age of 28.

Most had no prior experience of vehicle manufacturing or assembly but had the

potential to take over the English managers’ responsibilities during the following

three years, (and by and large did). A third group was created to serve as translators,

both literally, until the ﬁrst two groups developed facility in each other’s language but,

more importantly, as translators of the new ideas brought onto Polish ground by the

English managers; a translation process involving the negotiation of mutually

comprehensible meaning that made sense in a local cultural context but introduced new

cultural values (see, e.g., Latour, 1986; Rogers, 1995; and the discussion in Dobosz and

Jankowicz, 2002). These three groups of people were to see themselves as ‘the creators’

of Opel Polska. For the Polish participants in particular, this made for a feeling of

ownership quite unique among the sunset industries of the region (mainly coal and steel)

with their traditional, authoritative/authoritarian Polish style of management

(Jankowicz, 1994; Maczynski, 1994).

Selected from a pool of 46,000 applicants, the general workforce of 1,800 was chosen

for similar attributes: young, relatively inexperienced, willing to learn and energetic

enough to perform repetitive tasks for long periods of time while maintaining good

Dobosz-Bourne and Jankowicz: Reframing resistance to change 2025

quality standards. The lack of experience was perceived as an advantage for a candidate,

since GM managers considered working experience in the Polish car industry as

undesirable due to the poor production and management standards of the past, and the

danger of importing ‘bad habits’ that might be incompatible with General Motors’ vision

of quality assembly work. What was looked for was, as far as possible, a tabula rasa to be

enscribed and developed by intense training and guided experience in the run-up to the

start of production.

A phase in which the theory of kaizen, andon and gemba was outlined and the values

underlying them articulated was followed by training in generic, transferable skills

related to job families (e.g. the handling and integrating of elements of standardized work,

together with a set of associated problem-solving techniques). On-the-job training

followed, supported by hands-on supervision by the expatriate managers. Visits were

organized to other GM plants. While the training content was focused on the development

of speciﬁc technical skills, one of the earliest attitudinal lessons for the Polish employees

was that the commitment to quality values was more than the token sloganizing their

parents’ generation had experienced on the shopﬂoors of the command economy. The

message was conveyed in such an intense way that it was initially viewed as excessive and

exaggerated, by the general employees to be sure, but by their Polish supervisors as well.

So, an example from the training phase: the basic training about quality, what it is, what it gives,

its measurable beneﬁts, and ways of assessing and reporting it. It’s safe to say that all the

reporting requirements were met with utter distaste, That, yet again, to the limits of endurance,

one was required to take everything apart in ﬁne detail because that’s the rule, that’s the

standard, and there’s no avoiding it. Having said that, this attitude eventually got into people’s

blood. (Polish Manager 1, Opel Polska)

The change objectives were clear, and the difﬁculties of introducing new ways of

thinking were not underestimated. Fortunately, the English managers had prior

experience of start-ups to draw on; (see also Wickens, 1987).

We decided to take things from Japan based on what would ﬁt in with the local community of the

North East of England. And the similar type of thing, here, how it would ﬁt in with a local, Polish

culture. But that’s not, to say, well, the culture would necessarily accept this. Because we have

to say, we might break the culture of the local area. And we do things differently, because we

have to do it, to avoid a clash of standards. We have to bring the best ideas and working practices

to the business and if that doesn’t quite ﬁt in to the Polish culture, then we have to furnish a new

culture. (English Manager 1, Nissan UK, GME, Opel Polska)

The development of working practices at the level of individual behaviour was

coupled with an effort to create and shape culture at the broadest, plant-wide level, using

techniques and rituals to identify and support desirable general behaviour such as

attendance, punctuality, timekeeping, open communication and team-work. For this to

happen, change on a deeper level of personal values was required – in Kelman’s terms, a

matter of internalization rather than identiﬁcation with supervisors, or mere compliance

as a function of behavioural sanctions (Kelman, 1958, 1970) – together with changes in

the fabric of day-to-day experience.

I’m particularly impressed by their [foreign managers’] systematic approach to their job. That

they really can think, react, divide and connect, analyse and partition, allocate work, collect

results and come to conclusions, all in a deliberate and measured way. Sure, it reﬂects an

enormously well developed training background; at the same time, those people really must

believe in what they’re doing, otherwise they couldn’t possibly keep it up on a day-by-day basis.

That’s what we lacked in the old days. (Polish Manager 1, Opel Polska)

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