Corporate Culture: Hyundai Motor Company

HYUNDAI CULTURE ANALYSIS

Hyundai promote a customer-driven corporate culture by providing the best quality and impeccable service with all of our efforts aimed at satisfying our customers.
The Hyundai Motor Company (HMC) was established under the leadership of Ju Young Chung backed by a unified and centralized management structure. He exercised the authoritarian style of leadership. The decision making process was carried out by the Chung family. The positive out of this was that such an ownership and structure gave Hyundai Motor Company the power to pursue the external agents and develop long term relationship with them. This was seen when Hyundai Motor Company entered into an alliance with Ford. The chairman refused to transfer his authority

This was in the year 1987. The new leadership of HMC followed a very different organizational culture if compared to Ju Young Chung's time. The chairman made attempts to inspire HMC with the new thought process. This was "harmonious human relations, autonomous management, responsibility management, and equal opportunity." Thus it drove out the previous emperor leadership concept by the delegation of responsibility as well as authority to the various professionals employed by the organization. This change led to a change in focus with regard to strategy. 1987-1988 Se Young Chung redesigned the HMC and the main aim was to improve the production efficiency which was done by shuffling or merging the various job related functions. The most noticed change in the organization chart was the conversion from a functional organization to a divisional organization. This aimed at providing efficient control and evaluation, developed motivation of the management, improved the ability to cope with market diversification and reduction of the cost. The democratization of Hyundai was affected by the political democratization movements in Korean society in the late 80s. This led to a series of labor versus management disputes. HMC was definitely not an exception.

Even after the social revolution of the late 1980’s and 1990’s. Hyundai employees continue their tradition of working extremely hard. Words frequently used by foreign observers in describing this include “diligent” “self-sacrificing” “dedicated” and “dependable”. Even the Japanese frequently complain that the Koreans work too hard. Evidence of this can be seen in several areas. Consider, for example, one study in which Korean managers were asked what they would do if they had enough money to live on comfortably for the rest of their lives. A full 96 percent responded that they would continue to work hard despite their new found wealth. Asked if the managers would prefers to have more time for work or for leisure, 61 percent responded that they would prefer to have more time for work , only 38 percent preferred more leisure time. Whether such behavior represents a strong work ethics or a national value of work centrality can be debated. From the standpoint of worker productivity and industrial competitiveness, however it matters very little. Koreans simply work harder than most of their international