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While mentoring plays an important role in Japanese working places, formal mentoring programs have only recently been introduced. This chapter provides an overview of the development of mentoring in Japan and presents a conceptual model to comprehend mentoring in Japan and beyond. The chapter begins with the illustration of how the characteristics of Japanese organizations and Japanese-style human resource management (HRM) promoted the naturally occurring informal mentoring in the Japanese workplace in early years. In response to the stagnating economy and declining demographics during the last few decades, many Japanese firms adopted Western-style HRM practices, including formal mentoring programs. We provide statistical data to demonstrate the widespread adoption of formal mentoring programs in recent years. We then report the results of the systematic review of the academic literature on mentoring in Japan, suggesting that research on mentoring in Japan is still in the early stage. Based on the historical overview, current data and the systematic review of the academic literature, we develop a conceptual model of how the socio-cultural and economic context as well as organizational characteristics influence the adoption of Japanese-style naturally occurring informal mentoring and/or Western-style formal mentoring practices. We conclude this chapter with practical and theoretical implications.

This chapter explained the findings of a research that is aimed at studying the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer from Japanese companies to their business affiliates in Malaysia by looking into Japanese organizational culture and the mediating effect of the business affiliate’s learning intent. By focusing on attributes identified by existing literature, there were three aspects being investigated to study their roles in influencing the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer. These aspects are intensive and extensive job training, employee involvement and human relations, and leadership styles. The results indicate that all three aspects indeed led to a higher learning intention. The research also found that the business affiliates’ learning intent significantly mediates the relationship between organizational culture and the effectiveness of cross-border knowledge transfer. This study provides academicians and human resource managers deeper insights on how to improve knowledge transfer in cross-culture organizations by managing organizational culture more effectively.

Until around 1980, Japanese companies occupied a predominant position in Asia. Their Asian operations are managed by Japanese persons and in the Japanese language. This Japanese-style international management is well suited to transfer technology and know-how from Japanese parent companies to their overseas subsidiaries. But, it does not provide opportunities to local managerial and professional employees to display their abilities and initiatives. Japanese companies also have problems in Japan. They invest more in foreign countries than in Japan, which results in the hollowing out at home. Japanese companies are managed by old men and thus lack a strong leadership. Japanese multinationals are facing a challenging task of management innovation both at home and abroad.

The increased market share of foreign investment trusts in Japan may be attributed to the fact that Japanese managers have dramatically underperformed benchmarks. Recently, we showed that this underperformance can be attributed to a unique Japanese tax environment. Using data from 1998 though 2001, we find that Japanese and foreign managers are becoming very similar in style and performance. However, Japanese managers suffered in the immediate aftermath of a major April 2000 revision in the tax code. We attribute this result to the huge inflow of new money into this sector and the style shifts necessary to accommodate this flow.

This study investigates an approach for business management based on social rationality, which is attained through a proper balance between profits from economic exchange and benefits from social exchange.

First, this study examines the economic rationalization process developed by the business corporation, which is a great innovation in the modern West, but criticized for dominating people through overwhelming capital and power. Second, social rationality is explained by focusing on the balance between economic exchange and social exchange. Third, the ethics and practices of traditional Japanese and Islamic business management are examined including their underlying social rationality in business and shared commonalities in business practices that circulate economic gains in their societies.

By encapsulating all the relevant elements drawn from traditional Japanese and Islamic business, four conditions were found which successfully establish socially rational management based on sharing and reciprocity: an appropriately life-sized economy; relation-oriented management; a market in which a profit-seeking exchange economy and a profit-cyclical gift economy coexist; autonomous associations that are independent from the control of both state and business corporations.

This research reevaluates the rationality of management complying with business ethics, which has been kept in traditional and non-Western business practices. These management styles are considered to be incongruous with modern management philosophies that solely rely on economic gain, resulting in the neglect of significant cultural principles in modern management.

This chapter suggests a way to circulate the profits among people through sharing and reciprocity for the public to diminish external diseconomies and solve social problems such as poverty, pollution, war, and alienation through business.

This study presents a method of shifting the paradigm from economically rational to socially rational management, which is urgently required in current business practices worldwide.

This chapter aims to investigate the relationship between levels of subsidiary autonomy and the performance of a subsidiary’s subunit (factory) in Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries in Thailand. We conducted ordinary least squares regression analysis based on a questionnaire survey of 50 Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries in Thailand and multiple case studies to investigate the causal relationship between subsidiary autonomy and factory performance. We have three main findings. First, the autonomy level of Japanese manufacturing subsidiaries is linked to the subsidiaries’ factories’ performance compared to factories in Japan, but not in other foreign countries. Second, high levels of subsidiary autonomy are negatively associated with factory performance. Third, there are two causal relationships: high factory performance leading to low subsidiary autonomy and high/low subsidiary autonomy leading to low/high factory performance. From this, we discussed whether the degree of resource centralization in the home country influences the relationship between the level of subsidiary autonomy and a subunit’s performance in the foreign subsidiary. Moreover, we discussed the possibility that the causal relationships between them are not necessarily direct causal relationships. We identified a new factor determining subsidiary autonomy and investigated the relationship between the subsidiary autonomy and performance of a subunit in the foreign subsidiary compared to the home country. Because this has not been discussed in previous studies, this chapter contributes to the study of headquarters–subsidiary relationships and gives guidelines to practitioners on managing subsidiary autonomy.

This paper offers a cross-cultural examination of emotion management in two service organizations: a Japanese specialty shop and a chain of grocery stores in the US. Building on an overview of service culture in the US and its domestication in Japan, we provide an analysis of the two organizational case studies, focusing on their common initiation of a “behavior campaign,” its normative character, perceptions, and repercussions. The paper concludes by focusing on the comparative aspect of the analysis, locating the organizational management of emotions in the context of national culture, and focusing on the organizational use of broader emotional blueprints of socialization related to collectivism and individualism, such as “shame” (in Japanese culture) and “guilt” (in North American culture).

The world consists of diverse and distinctive economic systems. Due to the unique historical, cultural and location-specific contexts embedded in each economy, a comparison of strategic behaviors across economies is unlikely to provide a causal estimate of the influence of these contextual factors on strategy–performance relationships. In this paper, I outline three approaches to researching multinational firms that address this dilemma. They include the multilevel, historical and variance-centered perspectives, all of which can help international-business (IB) researchers develop stronger theoretical foundations from which to explain why country-specific contexts matter in designing IB action and research.

Do multinational companies (MNCs) transfer employment practices across their operations in different countries? In other words, are they innovators in national systems of employment relations or do they adapt to them? This question lies at the heart of much research in the field of international HRM, yet the debate is characterized by two quite different approaches to this question – the “global – local” perspective and the “segmentation” thesis – that have not engaged satisfactorily with one another. Drawing on data from a case study of an American multinational in China, we argue that analysis must be sensitive to the sector-specific conditions that create variation between MNCs in this respect. Specifically, the way that multinationals build international processes of production and service provision is a crucial factor in shaping whether they look to transfer practices and, therefore, whether they are innovators or adapters.

Korean organizations’ attempts to transplant home management practices directly to their overseas operations have not been received positively by foreign staff; the application of hierarchical Confucianist management principles has led to high reliance on expatriates in Korean overseas operations and failed integration with both local staff and local markets in host country. In this conceptual chapter, we examine the significance of strong informal social ties (based on the unique social psychology of jeong, woori and nunchi) as cultural control in the Korean workplace and develop this as a novel explanation for Korean management discomfort in overseas settings. Promotion of weak social ties with local staff is suggested as more appropriate for achieving goals of exploring local expertise and knowledge.