The Toyota Way – a quantitative approach

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to quantify Toyota's managerial values known as the Toyota Way to understand the cultural aspects of the Toyota production system (TPS). Design/methodology/approach The research methodology in this paper utilizes latent semantic analysis and singular value decomposition to analyze corporate memory documents to determine from organizational view how TPS is prescribed ideally to achieve Toyota's culture. Findings This work shows that the Toyota Way heavily centers on the principle ofGenchi Genbutsuwhich is the practice of seeing problems first hand. Findings also show that Toyota's widely popularizedKaizenphilosophy is de‐emphasized compared to team work and respect for people. Toyota's culture is somewhat balanced between individualism and collectivism which disagrees with most national Asian cultures. Finally, results show that Toyota reinforces both long‐ and short‐term orientations which disagree with most national views of Japan's national culture. Research limitations/implications Future work using latent semantic analysis should include a broader spectrum of literature on which to perform the analysis. This analysis is limited to developing theories about Toyota's culture but does not actually describe the culture that exist in the workplace. Practical implications This work provides a broad guideline with which to structure a lean culture. It provides the reader with knowledge of what parts of a corporate culture to deem the most significant. Improving upon each of these company values with the weighted significance elicited in this document could provide a positive impact within an organization. Originality/value The methodology used in this paper is a brand new, fledgling technique that could provide significant improvements in studying lean cultures. The concepts of this technique will be useful to researchers in this field and the results will be of value to management who wish to create a more efficient organization.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.