Culture at Anokyekrom

Case 1 CULTURE AT ANOKYEKROM

Anokyekrom is a Ghanaian automobile assembly plant employing some 13000 people. In response to increased foreign competition, the corporation decided to implement a participative management programme focused on quality. In 1980, the plant hired consultants to help implement a quality of working life programme. The union refused to participate, but approved a participative management programme and the plant management decided to go ahead.

The plant was functionally organized, with a plant manager, assistant plant manager and six department managers, include industrial relations, controller, quality, operations, manufacturing engineering and materials. The plant ran two shifts a day and in addition to the operations manager, there were 2 production managers (one responsible for each shift), 8 superintendents, 22 general supervisors, 7 utility supervisors and 66 foremen, each of whom supervised up to 50 hourly workers.

As a result of problems encountered in the implementation of the QWL programme after two years, it soon became clear that while both consultants and managers had originally engaged in a process with social and technical redesign goals, the real challenge was one of cultural change and personal transformation. They were up against a distinctive and extremely strong company culture, whose assumptions were working a kind of sea change with their interventions distorting their purpose and twisting their outcomes.

Aggression : 2 x 4 management

The culture of Anokyekrom was distinctive even by the estimation of company members. It positively sanctioned an aggressive macho management style, termed 2 x 4 management, which consisted of reprimands in the form of intensive verbal abuse (yelling and screaming), dramatic offenders. Extreme examples of this behaviour had become myth in the organization and perpetrators were spoken of as something of folk heroes:

In the old days here, there used to be a lot of grandstanding, but a...