Essay: The Emission Scandal of the Volkswagen Group

The Emission Scandal of the Volkswagen Group involves various levels of working groups and management groups in the organization. The top executives hold too much power and the company culture that discourage dissent are two of the main factors that cause such tragedy. The top management team who tolerate such illegal activity is accountable for most of the responsibility.
The Volkswagen Group operates in an autocratic leadership style, where the management team doesn’t value employees’ suggestion when they make decisions (p.448). When engineers’ advice that the engine may not pass the emission testing, the managers simply ignore the engineers’ suggestion and threatened them to find out a solution. Furthermore, the top management team in the company has too much reward power and coercive power (p.415). The company distributes bonuses based on both individual and team performance. Whoever tries to be the whistleblower will not get the individual bonus and the team that the person belongs to get penalized. Even though engineers notice their solution is unlawful, no one is willing to be the whistleblower. The costs are too high for the individual and the team.
The company culture of the Volkswagen Group discourages employees to go against the leader, which inhibit the establishment of devil advocates (p.352). Without people who continually challenge the status quo, the working teams, and management teams involved in
“groupthink”(p.390). It is apparent when the top executives allowed the illegal cheating software install in the engine, and when no engineers are willing to make a change as they find out a legal solution after they have implemented the cheating software on their product.
Recommendation for solving problem
The first thing that I would do to improve the company is to decentralize the power of top the management team. The previous top management team has too much power on hand that no others in the company can regulate their behavior. As a result, they bring up unlawful and unethical business tactics. I will reconstruct new management that involves more personnel from various levels within the organization. When more people are included in the company’s decision-making process, more sounds from different departments and different levels of the organization can be heard, hence, eliminate possible autocratic leadership style.
Furthermore, I will remove part of the reward and coercive power from the top management team, which they can reward and penalize employees reasonably based on their job performance, and not be able to punish whistleblowers. To further protect the whistleblowers, I will set up an investigation team that is not under the command of the top management team. This investigation team operating independently and reports directly to the broad. The whistleblower can report any unethical and illegal behaviors happens within the organization to the investigation team, and they will have the direct authority to examine and interview subordinate or even manager who are involved in such event. The information of the whistleblower will be well protected by the investigation team so that the top management can’t punish them personally. The investigation team will even granted the right to supervise senior managers when necessary. This change will ultimately lead to a more distributed power in the organization.
Lee 2
Another change that I will make is to establish a company culture that encourages the existence of devil advocates, which is, to develop a company culture that allowed opposite opinion from the top executives. All working team will be required to set up a bi-weekly meeting to discuss they job progress and list out any potential obstacle. Then the leader of the team will collect all the data and sent to the management team as a reference for decision-making. Such action will encourage engineers to speak up when problem arise. The engineers are the one who is mainly performing the job; hence, they are more familiar with the reachability of the work task that the managers assigned. In the Volkswagen Group, the top executives have exerted too much pressure on the engineers, without letting them speak up for themselves. As a result, there are no devil advocates to challenge the authority when the top executive allowed the engineers to implement the cheating software to the diesel engine.