Improving competitiveness in production by integrating transformational leadership with human resource strategy case study: WISCO

Abstract

Year 2008, world economy experienced another economic downturn triggered by the collapse of U.S. financial system. This placed many industrial organizations and manufacturers in dilemma, whereas on the other hand, China demonstrated continues growth in national GDP. These phenomena drew enormous attention from practitioners and academics. The most frequently asked questions in academic research are: Can we gain an insight of Chinese companies’ outperformance by evaluating it with the existing overall competitiveness analytical model? Would this competitiveness explained by the strategies Chinese companies adapted? Furthermore, could these finding on Chinese firms used as a feedback to improving the current overall competitiveness model?

To answer the preceding research questions, this thesis work focuses on Chinese stateowned manufacturing enterprises (CSOME) as they are the backbone of Chinese economy. Competitiveness evaluation is performed on case company Wuhan Iron and Steel (Group) Corporation (WISCO) using the overall competitiveness analytical model. The results indicate WISCO is highly competitive as organization type of analyzer.

From the further empirical research, it is found that WISCO has gone through continues organization transformations since 2005, it has also adapted new innovative human resource strategy to cope with the organizational changes. These findings indicate insufficient measurability of the existing overall competitiveness model in measuring organization’s efficiency on aligning its employees with the organizational changes. By integrating transformational leadership theory with WISCO’s human resource strategy, an AHP hierarchy is developed at the end of this study.