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This exploratory paper aims to examine attitudes and practices with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the effects of mandatory teleworking from home in the wake of the first state of emergency orders in Japan in 2020.

An online survey of married employees retrospectively assessed changes in work style, subjective well-being, work–family conflict and job performance before and during forced teleworking from home in Tokyo and three of the surrounding prefectures.

Regular employees reported high levels of anxiety and to have thoroughly implemented government-recommended hygiene and safety practices. A majority of respondents were satisfied with mandatory telework from home and desired to continue partial telework after the end of the pandemic. The strongest predictor of satisfaction with mandatory telework from home turned out to be adequate workspace at home for both men and women. However, the antecedents of the desire to continue working from home differed by gender.

These findings can help individuals, firms and governments better understand the effects of mandatory teleworking from home and devise countermeasures to maximize employee well-being and job performance. This is all the more crucial, as Japan has had successive waves of the virus and has declared numerous states of emergency since the beginning of the pandemic, forcing office workers to continue social distancing and remote working for the time being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first to provide insights on how imposed teleworking from home in the context of COVID-19 in Japan affected regular employees’ personal and professional lives and to identify predictors of satisfaction with teleworking and the desire to continue doing so.

Past research has convincingly shown that higher employee subjective well-being, or happiness, is a source of higher job performance and retention. This paper therefore examines the relationships between organizational virtuousness, subjective well-being, and individual job performance among French and Japanese employees.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among Japanese and French managers and staff at Japanese and French domestic companies and structural equation modeling was employed to compare those associations.

We found that the Japanese and the French have different conceptualizations of organizational virtuousness, suggesting that firms must tailor their virtue-building activities based on the local culture. Subjective well-being is comparatively more important in Japan since it acts in complement to organizational virtuousness to positively affect job performance, while in France, only organizational virtuousness counts as a source of job performance.

National culture is revealed to be a new factor explaining differences in how employees consider organizational virtuousness and we provide evidence of positive associations of organizational virtuousness with positive subjective well-being and with job performance for both the Japanese and the French.

Organizational virtuousness cannot be construed from a universalistic perspective where virtues are conceptualized on the same basis regardless of location or region, and firms should also consider their employees' individualist or collectivist inclination when trying to influence work outcomes.

These findings point to the role of national culture on the perception of organizational virtuousness and its effect on subjective well-being and job performance.

This paper aims to examine the effect of subjective well-being, often referred to as happiness, on the relationship between organizational virtuousness and job performance among Japanese employees. The concept of happiness has been receiving more attention over the past decade as research suggests that it may be a source of greater performance.

This research uses a questionnaire survey and conditional process analysis among Japanese managers and front-line workers within Japanese firms in Japan.

This paper found that positive subjective well-being partially mediates the relationship between general organizational virtuousness and self-management-related job performance, while it acts as a moderator in the relationship between general organizational virtuousness and leadership-related job performance.

These findings indicate that in the Japanese context, the firm’s investment in organizational virtuousness will increase one part of job performance, but that investment may not be sufficient in itself to positively affect leadership competency, unless it also pays attention to its employees’ positive subjective well-being.

Based on this growing realization of the importance of subjective well-being, or happiness, and the lack of academic research in Japan on its impact on organization, this paper investigates its effect on employees’ ability to manage their own tasks and lead others.

Whereas the USA is still the largest investment destination for Japanese companies, Japan also accounts as the second largest source of investment in the country. The purpose of this paper is to, empirically, examine the detailed motives of Japanese affiliates when investing in the Southeastern USA, adding to previous research at the national level.

This paper uses a qualitative approach based on the interviews of long-term Japanese investors in the manufacturing and wholesale trade industries in the Southeastern USA and applies text analysis to identify their motives.

The results show that Japanese firms engage in market- and efficiency-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI), and still apply a classic sequence of gradual and incremental market commitments. Market size and growth rate, reducing transaction or transportation costs, and integration within local value chains are the most important to them, whereas competition, creating an export base, lowering tax and accessing skilled labor are of little concern.

The goal of Japanese FDI in the USA is no longer to bypass tariffs but is still part of a complex industrial network of relations which drives further investment. This result can inform policy makers at the state level about the factors that can drive additional foreign investment, such as the establishment of industrial clusters.

This study offers current insights into the motives of Japanese FDI in two industries.

This paper aims to examine how students can learn how to work in multi-cultural global virtual teams in a classroom-based setting using experiential learning. The students from two graduate programs in France and Japan were given relevant reading materials, individual and joint team assignments on virtual team work and were asked to evaluate their work using previously identified global virtual team key success factors.

Text-mining and co-word analyses of students’ assignments, and correlations of keyword frequencies with student culture scores provide insights on how students first experience this novel setting, raising their awareness and providing them skills for future application in an organizational setting.

The process experienced by virtual student teams has many similarities with the team formation stage in virtual teams in organizational settings. Such experiential learning is useful for global virtual team education, as students will have already experienced and solved typical challenges in a safer non-work-related setting.

This study is based on a small sample of respondents and therefore presents inherent limitations in terms of significance and generalizability.

The rise of information and communication technologies has facilitated the creation of new approaches for coordinating work and, subsequently, for new collaborative organizational forms. Little research has been conducted to address education or training for these new and essential forms of collaboration.

We empirically assessed the antecedents of subjective well-being at work for French permanent employees.

The methodology includes qualitative and quantitative data analyses. In the first phase, interviews elicited the antecedents of subjective well-being at work among permanent French employees. In the second phase, a questionnaire survey was used to confirm the relevance of the antecedents uncovered in the first phase.

We found 14 distinct elements that influence French employees’ subjective well-being at work: corporate culture, job dissonance, relationships with colleagues, achievement, professional development, relationships with superiors, status, workload, perks, feedback, workspace, diversity and pay. Moreover, we identified discrete antecedents for the three components of subjective well-being at work: work achievement and relationships with superiors and colleagues for positive emotions at work, job dissonance and workload for negative emotions at work and organizational culture and professional development for satisfaction with one’s work.

The original contribution of this study is to have unpacked the black box of the antecedents of subjective well-being in the French workplace and to have uncovered discriminant predictors for each of the three components of subjective well-being at work. Furthermore, we specifically linked each of these three components with their most significant antecedents.

As Japan has been slowly opening up to foreign workers to supplement its shrinking workforce, local employees have had to deal with increased diversity at work, owing to the presence of foreign coworkers. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between foreign coworkers’ nationality (specifically Chinese, Korean and those from Western countries) and the perception of the benefits and threats of cultural diversity in the workplace by Japanese employees.

A sample of Japanese employees working in Japan, half of which working with foreigners, was used, focusing on those Japanese employees who reported working with foreign coworkers of a single nationality.

The authors found that Japanese workers’ perceived benefits of cultural diversity at work, but not perceived threats, are significantly impacted by the unique nationality of their foreign coworkers. Specifically, the effect of coworker nationality is most apparent for the two benefits of “understanding of diverse groups in society” and “social environment,” whereby cultural distance is significantly and positively related to these perceived benefits. And more benefits from cultural diversity at work are perceived by Japanese employees in the presence of Western or Chinese, rather than South Korean coworkers.

In the Japanese context, hiring employees from certain distant and heterogeneous cultures and nationalities could increase the positive perception of multiculturalism at work, therefore facilitating diversity management and fostering inclusion in the culture of the firm.

Very little research in Japan has examined perception biases among native employees based on the nationality of their foreign coworkers, which is critical as globally minded Japanese firms are trying to increase their level of internal internationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to confirm quantitatively the previous finding that organizational characteristics influence knowledge management, and to assess whether the national culture of knowledge workers equally affects the management of knowledge.

Based on data gathered from a questionnaire survey of a Japanese pharmaceutical company's 14 foreign subsidiaries, the effects of organizational characteristics and national culture on knowledge management were tested using multiple regression analysis.

Although organizational characteristics and national culture were found to affect knowledge management, the data showed organizational characteristics to be a stronger prescriptive factor compared with national culture.

Because this research centered on a single company in the pharmaceutical industry, future research should attempt to confirm the validity of this framework in other industries.

Changes in organizational characteristics, such as structure and relationship in particular, rather than adjustments in the composition of employees' nationalities, will have a stronger impact on the resulting knowledge management.

This framework linking organizational characteristics and national culture to knowledge management had received a first justification using a case study approach with a qualitative comparative method and has now been confirmed with a quantitative approach. Among the predictors of knowledge management beyond the realm of deliberate measures within the firm, the data show that organizational characteristics exert a stronger influence than national culture.

In an economy where firms compete for limited resources, focusing internally to boost efficiency and reduce waste is critical. In particular, the kaizen philosophy of continuous improvement in small sustainable increments has spread in the manufacturing industry with mixed results. However, the knowledge management requirements of kaizen have not yet been formalized for practitioners to easily check the necessary pre‐conditions of their organization. The objective of this paper is to explore the successful implementation of kaizen in terms of its organizational design and knowledge management preconditions.

Using a case‐study approach building on previous in‐depth research of New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (NUMMI) in Fremont, California, this study assesses the organizational and knowledge preconditions of kaizen.

The results show that the success of NUMMI may reside as much in Toyota's production system as in the alignment of kaizen and the organizational characteristics that support suitable knowledge management practices.

The findings highlight the need for practitioners who plan to implement kaizen to review their firm's organizational characteristics and knowledge management practices and ensure their congruence with the requirements of kaizen.

The paper shows how kaizen cannot be reduced to an add‐on grafted onto existing processes and aimed at temporarily fixing the bottom line. Instead, kaizen is deeply rooted in, and therefore strongly dependent on, the processes it intends to improve.

This study aims to identify and compare the knowledge and information retrieval needs from past projects and for future work among Italian and Japanese engineers. Engineering work, which is knowledge-intensive, is all the more critical as it both uses and generates knowledge for product and process innovation.

This research uses data collected from engineers in Italy and Japan from an online survey using open-ended questions in their native language. Answers were then translated into English and coded into pre-determined categories; statistical analyses including factor analysis were conducted.

For knowledge to be retrieved from past work, both Italian and Japanese engineers identified mainly experiential and systemic knowledge assets. For knowledge to be captured for future work, both groups picked experiential as well as conceptual knowledge related to the competitive environment of the firm absent from knowledge needs from past work. Finally, this research uncovered almost twice as fewer meta-categories for knowledge needs to be captured for future work compared to knowledge to be retrieved from past projects, as the former are by nature speculative and, therefore, difficult to foresee.

The study is limited to the engineering domain and to two countries. Further research should extend the scope beyond these two countries.

The study identified information and knowledge needs that could help inform the design of procedures to capture and document engineering work and the development of supporting information systems.

This research contributes to an increased understanding of the substance of information and knowledge needs in a knowledge-intensive environment such as engineering work and product/service development.