HRM Human Resources Management at Toyota Toyota\'s

HRM

Human Resources Management at Toyota

Toyota's handling of its need (or its perceived need) to eliminate certain staff and reduce labor costs is definitely a reflection of the principles of hard rather than soft human resources management. Rather than treating the human resources as individuals and ends in and of themselves, the company approached its human resources as purely another means to an end, without clarity or real input from the individual employees when it comes to the specific decisions (i.e. terminations) made. There was apparently a fair amount of communication between the labor union and the management at the factory leading up to the actual terminations, but ultimately this does not appear to have led to any meaningful influence over the decision making process that Toyota's management employed and therefore cannot be considered the type of real communication that would constitute a true soft human resources management approach. The level of judgment that is inherent in the scoring system that was ostensibly used to make the specific termination choices is also indicative of a hard rather than a soft human resources management style, and one of the workers who was terminated made comments to the effect that the company did not compensate well or otherwise treat employees with respect (though the fact that he was just let go from the company should of course be taken into account). All of this adds up to a clear hard style human resources management approach, not a more amiable and human-resource focused soft approach.

2. a) A unitarist perspective would definitely deem the legal action being brought by the labor union against Toyota as unnecessarily aggressive and disruptive, and indeed this perspective might delve even deeper into the issue and suggest that the apparent biased selection on Toyota's part of union representatives within the company as candidates for termination was a justified action on the company's part. The very existence of a union is seen as divisive in this perspective, as the management and labor elements of the company are supposed to act as a cohesive unit with pure and direct loyalty to each other; a labor union creates a different entity that requires loyalty from individual human resources (i.e. employees), and therefore cannot possibly support a unitary development and perspective within the organization and its actions. This perspective does not lay all the fault on the side of labor, however, as there was a clear breakdown in communications at the firm when it came to the specific termination decisions and this is what has led to the lawsuit. That is, a lack of real transparency and trust (or believability) in the method of selection employed directly contributed to the conflict and to the lawsuit brought by the union.