The Changing Face of Japanese Management

Keith Jackson, Miyuki Tomioka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134445165
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

For many western managers the approach taken by successful Japanese organisations and their managers has tended to inspire awe, envy and incomprehension in equal measure. But what is so special about 'Japanese' management? And how 'special' is the response of Japanese managers to global business pressures? This textbook addresses these questions. It presents case examples generated from interviews with Japanese managers in Japan, Europe and the USA, contextualising their comments by reference to recent research in the fields of international and intercultural management. The book explains how and why individual managers variously perceive threats or opportunities in the business and career environments currently evolving both inside and outside Japan. It combines vivid images of the expected and the exceptional, the traditional with the new and unfamiliar.
The Changing Face of Japanese Management offers management students with little prior knowledge of Japanese business and society, critical insights into what is happening inside Japanese management today. It also offers clear and immediately transferable insights to management practitioners who are preparing to work or negotiate with Japanese business partners.

1 First encounters

• SECTION 1: CROSSING BOUNDARIES

• Defining cultural boundaries

• Approaching cultures

• Encountering cultures

• SECTION 2: CRITICAL INCIDENTS

• SECTION 3: EXPLAINING JAPANESE MANAGEMENT BEHAVIOUR – A CASE STUDY

• The importance of context

• Distinctive features of Japanese-style management communication

• Practical recommendations

• SECTION 4: CHANGES IN JAPANESE MANAGEMENT CULTURE

• Problems and generalizations

• SECTION 5: OUR OWN APPROACH

Introduction

All people are the same. It’s only their habits that are different.

attributed to Master Kong Zhu (Confucius), Chinese, fifth century AD

Experience tells us that it is both efficient and respectful to approach international management or business encounters by concentrating on the essential similarities between people (e.g. their purpose in coming or working together) rather than give too much attention to superficial differences in behaviour. When we encounter, work or negotiate with managers or customers from cultural backgrounds different to our own we should remind ourselves that they too want to ‘win’.

The influence of Confucian thought is still great in East Asia – and Japan lies (from a western perspective) in East Asia. But the emphasis he gives to observing different ‘habits’ could persuade us to focus our discussion of Japanese management on different ways of behaving; for example, addressing the ‘kiss, bow or shake hands’ type of anxieties that beset most of us as we cross national and cultural boundaries on a mission to persuade or impress (cf. Morrison et al., 1995). We know that ‘getting off to a good start’ helps boost confidence, and that confidence goes a long way in business. However, by crossing national or cultural boundaries we inevitably encounter behaviours and attitudes that baffle us. For Japanese in Britain it may be something as banal as people blowing their nose in public. The key is to perceive cultural differences as a source of learning and not as a personal or professional threat.

Soichiro Honda, co-founder of the global giant, the Honda Motor Corporation, suggested a more recent uptake on the Confucius message. When pushed, Honda surmised that Japanese and US American management styles were ‘ninety-five percent the same’ and yet ‘different in all important aspects’ (Tsutsui, 1998: 13). Was he talking about 5 per cent difference in technique? Or 5 per cent in attitude? In this first chapter we try to identify and explain in practical terms some of these ‘5 per cent’ of differences. We refer (critically) to notions of national culture. However, we focus on the perceptions and experiences of individual managers, believing in this and subsequent chapters that herein lies the potential for a more effective and longer-lasting understanding of how and why Japanese managers tend to make the personal and professional decisions they do.

Our objectives for this first chapter are:

• to offer an insight into how international management researchers and other experts describe Japanese management culture;

• to equip non-Japanese managers and students of management with references and conceptual tools which should help them better recognize, explain and (where feasible) predict some of the behaviours and attitudes they are likely to encounter when working with Japanese business partners;

• to encourage us to question our own assumptions about ‘culture’.

SECTION 1: CROSSING BOUNDARIES

When observing and discussing how individuals behave either collectively or individually in different situations or contexts, the question of ‘culture’ arises. ‘Culture’ is a highly complex notion; it is ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams, 1985) and in international management literature ‘over 450 definitions of the word culture exist’ (Herbig, 1998). What international managers want to know – and particularly HR, sales and marketing managers, together with managers on international assignments – is how people’s experience of culture influences their choices of behaviour in standard and non-standard situations.

Accordingly, discussions of culture become particularly significant when considering how people individually and/or collectively respond to a crisis. Japanese managers currently face a professional crisis: the established assumptions about job and career security are changing rapidly and radically; furthermore, the nature and boundaries of traditional Japanese markets are changing as globalization takes hold. How individual Japanese managers are responding to this crisis is the focus of discussion in this book. In this first section we offer an introductory discussion of Japanese management culture from a non-Japanese perspective.

Open your mind

To understand Japanese management effectively we need to open our mind to other perspectives and norms of behaviour. Indeed, this is a pre-requisite for trying to understand any national culture effectively, including our own. For example, if this book were written using Japanese script it would be possible to read each page from left to right and top to bottom one line at a time (as we assume you are doing now). However, it would also be possible for the same text to be arranged such that it could be read from right to left, top to bottom, and not one line at a time but one idea or written character (kanji and other symbols of Japanese writing) at a time. So, for example, the two kanji (Figure 1.1) could be written one above the other and still give the meaning: ni-hon or ‘Japan’. Attention to the form or the process, as much as to the message or the content, is one key to understanding Japanese-style business and management communication.

Figure 1.1 NI-HON

Time

Time shapes our experience of culture. In time, we talk about culture-specific traditions. The temptation for westerners to exoticize Japan and Japanese management culture comes partly from history and cultural tradition. When, during the last quarter of the previous millennium, news and artefacts started coming back to Europe and then North America from Japan and other Asian cultures, a notion of orientalism – as something mysterious ‘from the East’ – arose. But as with all such relative points of reference, ‘from the East’ means ‘east’ of where we personally stand. Where we stand determines our perspective and where we draw boundaries on the cultures of others.

Space

Space is another key factor in shaping cultural experience. Geographically, the islands of Japan lie in East Asia. The Chinese, also East Asians, have for the last few thousand years been confident that they stand in the middle and everybody else to the east or west, north or south of them: hence the idea of China as ‘the middle kingdom’. It was the Chinese who first named today’s Japan the islands of Nihon (Nippon) as the islands where (from a Chinese perspective) the sun rises. Correspondingly, the two kanji illustrated above signify (from left to right) ‘sun’ and ‘origin’. This information reached Europe via Marco Polo.

Language

Our experiences of time and space are understood and communicated through language. Accordingly, language is a powerful expression of individual and collective cultural identity. Most of what we know of our native or ‘mother’ tongue we learn during our most formative years: probably until the age of twelve or fourteen. This explains why many adults find it difficult to learn a foreign language with fluency and confidence. Language takes the form of both verbal symbols (e.g. speech and writing) and non-verbal symbols (e.g. gestures and eye-contact). After crossing geographical and political boundaries, and perhaps time zones, it is our encounter with a different language that usually reinforces our sense of having crossed a cultural boundary.

Cultural boundaries

We should recognize that cultural boundaries need not coincide with national boundaries, though in the case of Japan, nation and culture are (as we shall see) easily confused. In fact, we can encounter a different ‘language’ by crossing organizational boundaries (e.g. in the jargon of lawyers or doctors). Even within organizations each department or section may have its own jargon or ‘in-jokes’, its myths and traditions, fluency in which distinguishes ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’. The notion of culture-specific ‘insiders’ who share context-specific information is a key element in understanding Japanese management culture and the behaviour of Japanese managers, as we discuss in detail in Chapter 2.

Defining cultural boundaries

According to Giddens (1989: 31) a culture can be defined by reference to the values that members of a given group hold (e.g. how they claim to think the world ought to be) and the norms they follow (e.g. what members of the group currently choose to be appropriate and/or inappropriate behaviour in a given situation). These norms of behaviour are often determined by a ‘significant minority’ of members whose views carry more weight on account of their relative status (e.g. age, experience) or of their perceived or ascribed authority: e.g. parents, teachers, religious leaders, the ‘boss’; and also people we individually choose as role models such as sports heroes or charismatic business leaders. Among many Japanese managers, Soichiro Honda (mentioned in our introduction) has such status. Among Americans it might be Jack Welch, former chief of GE. With the growing internationalization in management studies, aspiring managers will take their inspiration from a range of sources.

We should note that behavioural norms tend to be more superficially held than values, and so are more adaptable to immediate circumstances. For example, many cultures share the value that killing people is ‘wrong’. However, in circumstances of extreme crisis (e.g. war), individuals who share this value may suddenly adopt contradictory norms (e.g. go out and kill people). In short, values and norms are subject to change according to time, place or circumstances and, not least, each individual’s experience and perception of what is or might be allowed by the ‘significant minority’ of the culture-specific reference group: i.e. those who might call the individual to account for errant behaviour. The influence of reference groups in Japanese management behaviour is a focus for our discussion in Chapter 2.

Giddens (1989) also explains how a culture can be distinguished by reference to the material goods that the members of the group create or use. These material goods (or artefacts) can be recognized in personal choices of food, dress, and other commodities such as cars, mobile phones, and so on. Material goods can also be recognized in the form of architecture, road design, signposting and other social facilities. Language is also a collective and culture-specific creation or artefact.

Approaching cultures

As suggested above, when we travel around on business – or even when we turn on a television set – we encounter different cultures. In describing encounters with culture, Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1998) identify three layers of intercultural contact. First in line comes the encounter with explicit products; then at a deeper level the encounter with sets of norms and values; and then, at a deeper level again, with core assumptions. One difference between these three layers and those outlined by Giddens is the significance given to ‘core assumptions’.

Core assumptions

We each acquire a set of culture-specific core assumptions in much the same way as we learn our ‘native’ or so-called ‘mother’ tongue. Accordingly, these core assumptions are transmitted from generation to generation (often in the form of stories or myths) and serve to explain and actualize the efforts made by individuals – singly and above all collectively – to survive against natural elements – ‘the Dutch with rising water, the Swiss with mountains’ (Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, 1998: 23). To these we can add the US Americans with their wide plains and the Japanese with their mountains and the ocean on all sides. This notion of ‘survival’ against hostile elements (e.g. ‘competitors’) can be readily translated to the field of corporate strategy (cf. Henderson, 1989).

Encountering cultures

Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner’s view of culture can be applied to predict how non-Japanese managers are likely to experience their encounter with Japanese culture or indeed any other business culture. The learning value of engaging in this process is enhanced by asking ourselves critical questions such as ‘why this?’ and ‘why not that?’ at each stage in the encounter. To make the experience memorable, we could also ask ourselves ‘and why do I react as I do?’

Our own tentative definition of Japanese culture will take its initial shape in response to first impressions. These will include explicit products, such as language, architecture, dress, food, and so on. Our ability to recognize these will be influenced by the broader environmental context given by our perception of the climate and of time differences, and so on.

After a period of familiarization – more or less long, depending on our prior experience of international travel, of Asia, and our individual sense of flexibility, adaptability and confidence – we then begin to discern a second layer of culture where norms and values become evident. According to Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner, norms are ‘the mutual sense a group has of what is right and wrong’ [emphasis as in original] (1998: 21–22). They go on to state that ‘norms can develop on a formal level as written laws, and on an informal level as social control’ (1998: 22). For example, at the airport we will notice signs and instructions directing us in what we should do, and what not. From these encounters we will begin to extrapolate and form a generalized idea of ‘Japan’, ‘Japanese people’ and ‘Japanese culture’.

Norms are commonly assumed to dictate individual behaviour: the feeling of how one should or should not ‘normally’ behave in culture-specific situations. Further into our encounter with Japanese culture we will observe ex...