General Motors Defining QWL At General

. . a process for improving the utilization of human resources, developing all members of the organization an awareness and understanding of the concerns and needs of others together with a willingness to be more responsive to those concerns and needs, and improving the longterm effectiveness and success of the organization.

That definition of QWL is quite a mouthful, but what exactly does it mean? What the QWL program at General Motors is, in reality, is a major departure from the traditional functioning of the organization. Under QWL, the organizational environment in a General Motors plant ceases to be a battleground where labor and management continually confront one another, and becomes, instead, an arena in which labor and management cooperate in (1) the development of organizational goals, (2) the development and implementation of production practices and procedures, (3) the identification of problems confronting the organization, (4) the development of solutions to those problems, (5) the attaining of organizational objectives, and (6) the sharing of the rewards attendant to the accomplishment of those objectives.

Importantly, QWL is not a pateralistic program imposed on employees by General Motors management. While it is true that the demonstrated success of the program has led General Motors to direct the development and implementa

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superfluous. Hard and diligent efforts by Irv Bluestone of the United Auto Workers, and Stephen Fuller of General Motors led to the development of guidelines which sufficiently allayed misgivings on both side to permit the implementation of pilot QWL programs. The dire straits in which the domestic automobile industry found itself in the 1970s provided an added impetus for innovative action. The success of the pilot QWL programs promoted the spread of the concept to other General Motors plants. The Future of QWL In one sense, the introduction of QWL may be compared to the introduction of the metric system into a society used to traditional English weights and measurements. As the older generation dies off, the metric system is the only system with which the remaining members of society are familiar, and opposition to the metric system disappears. This phenomenon occurred in Britain, and is rapidly occurring in Canada. A similar projection may be made for the future of QWL at General Motors, although the road to the future will be strewn with the boulders of increasing automation and foreign competition. Case 21: First Federal Recommendation for Current Year Bonus Gene Rice should recommend the payment of
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Approximate Word count = 1368
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)