Researching, Toyota Recall

So today in class we researched for the semester organizational behavior project. I am here to discuss what I have found and to present some of the ideas that we are trying to research. We didn't start out with Toyota's recall, we first thought we had wanted to research the occurrence of Steve Jobs stepping down from being CEO of Apple. My team felt that they simply did not have enough data for this project and so we moved on to the Toyota recalling of fault accelerator petals. This incident dealt with the accelerator petals in Toyota cars that would suddenly seem to accelerate to high speeds with out the drive initiating/applying pressure to the petal itself. This was a major problem for Toyota when it happened, and it required a special kind of response. I am focusing specifically on product safety and crisis management in my organizational research. I believe to get to the heart of the problem it is imperative to see how an individual operates under a crisis management mode. Reactions are different and stress is high when experiencing very high pressure situations. The thought process is different and requires careful decision making as to not further exacerbate the problem. The second research topic I am looking into is safety and culture. These two aspects really are important to explore from the fact that Toyota is an international company which has different cultural values of safety. It is important to understand both of these in a social context before we can move on and apply them to Toyota's accelerator problem. These two topics will be crucial in dissecting the organizational problem behind Toyota's former crisis and may even shed light on a better course of action or prevention plan that may help in future crisis.