General Electric 노사관계의 역사적 전개와 리더십

General Electric has a history of over 130 years in business. However, GE’s successful story focus on only its strategy and famous leaders such as the founder Thomas Edison, the powerful ex-CEO Jack Welch, and the current President Jeffrey Immelt. This case study emphasizes the change of focus from the traditional leadership and strategy perspective to human resource management and industrial relations perspective as core factors of GE success. Based on the historical development of U.S. industrial relations, this paper specifies the stages in the development of GE industrial relations. To summarize the success factors of GE: First, GE removed the same uniformity from the viewpoint of leadership and selected best qualified person out of the conventional management succession plan. Second, GE were able to make the necessary changes to respond to the new environment before it was too late, based on adaptability to challenge the current business and policy. Third, GE have built up a basis for continuous improvement by continuously providing education and training programs for employees and management and equitable evaluation and compensation in relation to the training of human resources. Fourth, GE minimized unnecessary conflict by using policy that fully reflects various backgrounds of stakeholders. Finally, GE have set a realizable target and have always accomplished it.The conclusion of GE case study from the analysis of its historical development in industrial relations is to break the stereotype that the success is up to the leadership and strategies of the CEOs. Instead, the primary factor of GE success over 100 years is CEOs’ recognition that workers are the partners for business and CEOs should cooperate to protect workers’ labor right from the beginning of the establishment. This will lead to the future shape of GE where both management and labor unions work together for sustainable growth of GE. The implication of this case study on Korean companies is that many companies in Korea have focused on benchmarking GE in the past and have followed the externally presented management strategies. Unfortunately, benchmarking of GE's invisible accumulated human assets or corporate culture within the generations has been relatively inadequate. I would like to summarize the following implications for companies in Korea. First, our companies missed to catch up the top priority in GE's DNA, in corporate philosophy and corporate culture, that is, in corporate strategy, and in the GE history. It is the establishment of a system that supports management's attention and care for human resources.Second, Korean companies are struggling to cope with the big changes of the 4th industrial revolution but failing because of sticking to traditional management strategy for high growth, while the giant dinosaurs such as GE are rapidly gaining ground in software and digitalization. It is the result of the continuous education and training investment in human resources to realize and the strategy to predict or design the future based on stable leadership of executives over 15 years of average working years. Finally, the strategy to cope with the change among the values that the company should pursue can be changed in terms of direction and speed according to the management environment, but the value that the company should not change is the philosophy and belief about people and human resources. GE's success DNA that Korean companies must benchmark is the situation that creates a synergy through active cooperation and persuasion with labor union that supports the preemptive business direction based on the leadership of GE management. The limitations of this study are as follows: first, there is no unified classification standard in the US labor relations period classification, so it is somewhat subjective to classify GE labor relations as first-to-build-chaos-to-maturity. Second, labor-management relationship is overemphasized as the most important GE's key success factor while other factors are not explained sufficiently in this paper.. Third, there is a lack of recommendations for Korean companies because we can not find a similar company in Korea However, this study contributed that cultural factors such as people-oriented philosophy and historical factors such as industrial relations were newly analyzed in this case study while traditional benchmarking study focused only on management strategy and innovations. Benchmarking overseas companies for the merits of successful experiences only can not guarantee the success of Korean companies anymore. Korean companies need to set up and improve people-oriented management philosophy and the supporting system based on this philosophy for the sustainable growth in the coming competitive business environment.