The hubris and arrogance on the Fourteenth Floor of GM HQ is legendary and has been chronicled in many reports and case studies.
Here's some excerpts from one, with some good parts in bold:
The GM “culture”
GM was such a powerful, dominant company that its cars, and its name, were an American institution. The trouble was, the company was managed like an institution. It was highly risk-averse, chronically slow to change, endlessly bur-eaucratic, and contemptuous of competition.
GM employees were expected to display unwavering loyalty to the GM organization, subsuming their personality to that of the corporate giant. Employees were expected to be “team players,” meaning that they never questioned a decision, never contradicted the boss, and conformed with the corporate stereo-type.
One author describes a GM employee driving 40 miles each morning to pick up his superior’s newspaper, and saying he didn’t mind the chore because one day he would be promoted and have someone perform the task for him-.[vi] A second writer
tells the story of a GM executive who required his morning orange juice to be a certain temperature, so each day an underling would check the glass of juice with a thermometer.[vii]
Risk and creativity were not in the GM lexicon. A memo circulated by a senior GM executive in 1988 said, “Our culture discourages frank and open debate. The rank and file of GM personnel perceive that management does not receive bad news well.”[viii] Automotive analyst and author Maryann Keller
quotes one executive who told her, “If you raised a problem, you got labled as “negative,” not a team player. If you wanted to rise in the company, you kept your mouth shut and said yes to everything.” Keller asserts that the guiding principle of GM corporate life was, “Above all, be loyal to your superior’s agenda.”[ix] This culture was matched by the decision-making process. Decisions were shuttled higher and higher up a hierarchy of committees so that if anything went wrong, nobody would ever take the blame. Orders flowed from the top down; ideas seldom percolated up. It was a system in which no one took responsibility for any decision, so no one had any need to be accountable for one. The same 1988 memo pointed out that fewer than 100 salaried workers (out of over 100,000) were dismissed annually for poor performance between 1977 and 1983.[x] Keller points to a 1980s study by the McKinsey management consulting firm that highlighted the accountability problem.
The study detailed how an engineer, faced with a defect, couldn’t simply offer a solution to the manufacturer. Rather, “you have to produce 50,000 studies to show that it’s a better solution, then you have to go through 10 different committees to have it approved.” [xi] The stultifying bureaucracy resulted from the fact that GM concentrated more on “making the numbers” than on making cars. This derived from the dominance of the financial wing of the company.
Here's that particular corporate case study. It's a pretty interesting read.
http://www.thecorporatelibrary.com/special/cgii/cases/cs_gm.html