Management: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) by John Hendry

Author:John Hendry [Hendry, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Published: 2013-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

Japanese management and organizational culture

While consultants and practitioners struggled to put human relations principles into practice, the emergence of serious competition to American and European multinationals from Japan in the 1970s suggested an alternative take on the problem of worker commitment. For while the large Japanese companies seemed to benefit from very high levels of employee commitment, this was not obviously achieved through inspirational leadership or empowering managers. On the contrary, Japanese firms were strongly hierarchical organizations, with many of the characteristics of traditional bureaucracy. They did, however, offer lifetime employment (albeit only for men—women were still expected, as they had been in Europe fifty years earlier, to resign on marriage) and comprehensive social welfare programmes, and they also bound their employees to the aims of the organization through very strong corporate cultures. In the early 1980s a rash of popular, practitioner-oriented books, mainly written by management consultants, extolled the virtues of corporate or organizational culture as a management tool.

Some of these books focused explicitly on the virtues of Japanese management. The most influential of these, both published in 1981 and instant bestsellers, were The Art of Japanese Management, by McKinsey consultants Richard Pascale and Anthony Athos, and Theory Z: How American Business can Meet the Japanese Challenge, by management professor Bill Ouchi. ‘Theory Z’ was Ouchi’s recipe for how American companies might adopt and adapt some of the key features of Japanese management, and was presented as building on but further developing McGregor’s Theory Y.

The most striking feature of Japanese management was the priority it gave to collective over individual values. Decision making was highly consensual, with no decision formally taken until all those affected and concerned had committed to it. This was accompanied by collective responsibility. There were no individual incentives, and although the basic structure was bureaucratic, teamwork was commonplace and cut across bureaucratic lines, as managers put together teams based on skills and personalities rather than job titles. There was a high level of trust between managers, and between workers and managers, and innovations were welcomed rather than rejected. The flexibility of the organization and the job security combined to allow people to experiment collectively with new ideas, without fear of short-term performance consequences.

All this was made possible by a setting in which people knew each other intimately and were motivated by common goals. Part of this came from lifetime employment. Part of it came from extensive company-specific training programmes. Part of it came from a caring and trusting environment, and from an interweaving of business and social life. Leisure was an extension of work, and the company acted as an extended family—to the detriment, often, of a manager’s real family, who might see very little of him. At the centre was a strong set of corporate values, embodied in symbols, routines, and practices, and supporting a common understanding of what the company was about, where it was going, and how it was getting there: a strong organizational culture.

These explorations of Japanese management were quickly followed

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