Japan Vs Korean Management styles

Japanese Management Style:

                                                ’’The Japanese flag is called Hinomaru (circle of the sun).

                                              The red circle on the white background symbolizes the sun.’’

                                               This clearly shows how good is their relationship with nature

                                           Japan's Imperial Crest is a sixteen petaled chrysanthemum

.                                                    This is the standard of the Japanese emperor whom rules there

                                                  The Japanese anthem is called Kimigayo: 

May the reign of the Emperor continue for a thousand, nay, eigth thousand generations and for the eternity that it takes for small pebbles to grow into a great rock and become covered with moss.

In Japanese, the country is called Nihon or Nippon. The two Chinese characters may be translate as "origin of the sun" or "land of the rising sun". The name Japan is believed to have come from European pronunciation attempts of Chinese words for "Japan".

The Japanese management style is very particular; it has its origins on the samurai culture, they were ancient japanese warrior that served to feudal lords in order to provide them protection, it was about the 12 th century; the samurai Virtues were:

•        

–      Rectitude

–      Courage

–      Benevolence

–      Respect

–      Honesty

–      Honor

–      Loyalty

They tend to be individualistic for their spiritual traditions, but at the same hand they are very committed to the group because of the samurai values. At the organization context they have strong behavior rules, as well at the current life, at the work field they keep the school traditions, this is because they have a very strict social classes system, that mixed with their high long term orientation, and the ancient samurai virtue of loyalty explain the reason of why the remain in jobs for long period of times, committed to the company. This is an study made to mesure the disposition of Japanese to move from a compay to another one, by gender and age

What we see in the graph is that men as more loyal to the companies, and that even though they are a very masculine society women are getting more strong in the counties work force, in contrast to the old traditions in which only men participate in wars and were the lords guards, while women had to remain at home; we can also appreciate that women can change easily their job and they keep changing it until a higher age in contrast to the men that find their life work faster.

According to Hofstede ]apanese people “people minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures” it also has an explanation on the bushido rules and traditions. Bushido is their most practice religion and is native from Japan.

Japanese culture is very influenced by other theories like Buddhism, Zen, Feng shui, etc and since the ancient times, for them, the older you are the wiser you become, this is because since a person should learn every day especially from the mistakes and put that into a reflexive situation to create knowledge an older person is supposed to be wiser that a younger one; in consequence they have a high hierarchical managerial system, with lifetime jobs and a seniority wage and promotion system.

Other important characteristic of the Japanese management style is the enterprise‐based unions, this unions show up during the meji era, in the time of the reconstruction after the bombing, what at the time create the conditions to have the government supporting the economical unions like the zaibatsu in order to pull up the whole economy, by the way of job creations and the added value exportations, giving them loans, taxation and legal benefits making some of the very powerful and influential increasing the power distance between big and small  companies.

tema 5

tema 5

tema 4

tema 3

tema 3

Personality, perception and attribution + attitudes and values

Pygmalion effect

Perception is the process of receiving internal or external information about the environment through the senses and the mind; human kind have the ability to remember events from the past and use them in order to decide about which way should be follow in a new situation. And when this new situation has relation with some elements of the past, the perceiver tends to analyze the situation with the information that brought from the past; this is call preconceptions.

Those preconceptions are extremely important to understand, because they are the base of the human knowledge, when a subject is expose to a certain situation the natural reaction is to bring elements from the past the objective to complete the information that is perceiving, this happens because they are unable to complete the missing part of the situation, like it’s origin and implications without bias of previous knowledge. This knowledge is the reality for the perceiver and he feels secure about that knowledge because, it is the one that he has experience through his own senses, that at the same time are being influence by the subjects background such as education, family, religion, profession, language, gender, age and nationality among others; then each human been has different preconceptions to analyze and understand the new situations. In consequence each human been has, lives and perceives different realities.

In the next graph the information process can be appreciated since the objective reality and how it is transformed by perception through the point of becoming knowledge

wickstep.com/search/the-perception-process.html

This understanding is important because the authors of the text aims to put in the table the key elements of the managerial behavior that can influence on the organizational performance Adler and Gundersen (2007) explain:’’ manager’s values, beliefs, and attributes would influence both the manager’s behavior and that of subordinates’. If the idea of the process is applied to aid project setting, aid worker’s expectations could negatively work on local colleagues due to the influence of simplified and biased perception.’’ As clear as that the perception is a key concept use in the development of the organizational strategy; but who to do that?

The first step is to evaluate the real influence of perception within an organizational structure and then with the help and resources of the Spanish knowledge Society Research Center where they develop a whole research where they state as variables the different elements that can influence on the employees perception, such as they personal background, the way they felt at the work place, their self image, meta-image, and self-conception about their working relations among others, their motivational level to conclude how all this elements would affect the final performance at the working time regarding an specific aspect that have strong effects on the final performance of the employees; the preconception from two opposite perspectives; a positive or negative preconception of a subordinate would encourage the final performance, due to the Pygmalion effect theory.

The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in 1988 on it’s article on Harvard Business Review as "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," the research done by Gregorio Martín-de-Castro, José Emilio Navas-López, Pedro López-Sáenz and Elsa Alama found that within in a managerial status the way that managers perceive their subordinates has strong influence on the goals achieving.

The study states that when a manager have a positive image of an employee, the attitude showed to him is going to be more empathetic and the type of tasks assigned to him are going to be more challenging and important motivating the employee to take his efforts to the best of his abilities, due to the extra motivational attitudes of the boss; in the other hand if a boss has a negative image of a particular employee, his body language and gestures will project a different message to the other party, generating different expectations in a lower direction disvaluing the subordinate assigning him low importance tasks, that makes him feel bad producing as well the same kind of results. Because of that many motivating strategies have been developed in order to design a good organizational environment that encourage personnel to give their best, building a good working environment to improve the generated value at the end of the period.

Organizational Capital as competitive advantage of the firm

‘’The elements that constitute the organizational capital or capital of the firm, namely its culture, structure, organizational learning, can be a source of competitive advantage´´  this texts is based in a research study  as well, there the main topic developed is the competitive advantage as the best way to differentiate from the competence and establish the business in the market as an strong competitor loking for differential elements to set an strategy; the whole theory is base on two main axioms. ‘’ the first one argues that reduce endowments are heterogeneously distributed among firms, and this explains difference in firm performance.´´

‘’ the second axion states that owing or controlling superior resources and capabilities allows the firm to sustain the competitive advantage.’’

This tow axioms wants aims to define which resources the company controls and how to build entrance barriers for competitors in the specific market. Resources and capabilities are those production factors available for the company in order to developed the current activities while capabilities are those activities that a company is able to do and for doing those activities it needs to use some resources, so the management of them is a critical activity inside the company so the capability management aims to optimize for balancing the resources in order to set strategies to innovate and differentiate.

The difference between both of them is that capabilities are complex, collective and dynamic while resources are independent, simple and static.

  The intellectual capital what strongly diferenciate one company from other one, and is this factor what creates added value and get to the target market depending on how useful and well managed is it, the most sell shares at the new York stock excahge market are those with high levels of innovation and technology, that have manage efficiently their intellectual property, that mixed with the culture, structure and organizational learning creates a very good organizational environment enhancing for value creation by taking advantage of the organizational culture.

International management and culture summary

According to geert hofstede national culture is ´´ the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the member of one human group from another … Culture, in this sense , includes systems of values; and values are among the building blocks of culture.’’ Then it can change from one place to another, and according to the same author it is something that is learn, not innate, referring to the thesis that it is being transfer from one generation to the next one in a process that has its origins on the basic instinct of the human been to get adapt easily to the environment in which lives or develop. This theory states that a baby since get borne start to imitate the gestures of the people surrounding him or her in order to be accepted by them, especially with the mother and the father and because of that hostedes says that when a baby gets to the age of five, ‘’ is already an expert in using the language’’, ‘’ interacting with other members of the family, eliciting rewards and avoiding punishments, negotiation for what he or she wants and how to cause or avoid conflict’’

According to Nelson, D.L & Quick, J.C hofstede´s definition is not enough to describe neither the organizational culture or the national culture itself and becase of that they describe how Values and religion, but even thou they say express that believes and religion cannot be use to predict efficiently the human behavior because believes are based on attitudes and opinions while religion influence can change from country to country and as a clear example they compare Catholicism in Peru and Turkey, two totally different countries in which any one can be find Catholics, but in a dipper view they have very different life styles and national cultures and so on. Nevertheless values can be a good point, to focus attention when studying the organizational culture, because they remain in the society longer than other aspects of it.
Now using this information to prepare the international managers to do their best when facing activities within an international environment is necessary to understand and differentiate different variables and factors that must be consider when managing cultural diversity in order have tools to comprehend others behavior and implement strategies tending to avoid conflict, since the perspective of the cultural awareness being conscious of the different background of the team mates and employees , improving the manager skills and consecutively the organizational cultures in terms of uncertainty avoidance, because when the boss decides to run such an strategy like that with the proper tools to be aware of his or her employees background, adapting to the new environment is easy and the uncertainty avoidance level goes down. Just for the fact of accepting the otherness as something natural the team work will improve and its members will easily integrate
Dealing with Cultural Differences

Masculinity is one of the hofstede´s dimensions for the national cultural approach that applied to a company in terms of multicultural management can show a situation like this:
A German man goes to work on a Chinese company, the German culture in a general context there according to the research has a high masculinity level, and when doing business they go straight to the point in a very business focus way, while in the Chinese culture with a low level of masculinity, they are really concerned about establishing a close relationship with the other and creating safety, comfortable environment before even start with the real business negotiations, so if there is not cultural awareness the Chinese people could think that the German mate could be rude and disrespectful while in the other hand if a Chinese man would go to work in Germany is possible that his work mates could consider him as a bad worker, with a lack of focus and interest about the work

Corporate culture


‘’ within each hospital multiple styles of leadership and types of organizational culture existed’’. Charlotte Huff, this was a conclusion made as result of a study made in some united states hospitals, and for this particular case is the base to understand that there are different groups of people within the same, organizational culture, that at the same time have different types of needs, but sharing a common background that makes them share a lot of values and beliefs that have origins on the formal and informal aspects of the organization, as well as the history and CEO´s management style. In this sense the mission and vision of the company play important roles in contrast to the management style and the hierarchy structure. All this elements are there to give direction to all the organization members to the goal achieving.
For example nowadays the global context is strongly competitive, in terms of quality and price; as a consequence different organizational models have been created in order to establish ether formal an informal procedures with an specific goal. Six Sigma and Total Quality Management are clear examples of this; both of them establish policies and strategies in order to have competitive success involving several member of the company involve in the hole procedure acting as a new tendency for the internal culture. With the objective to implement such systems, the whole company gets touch by the new policies and in different areas of it, the personnel requires training and follow up of their results and commitment with the new policies, that at the and are changing the internal culture and so on.
In the same way, if a company desires to change it’s internal culture, is necessary to implement a whole campaing that includes, a communications plan impacts the target employees and that links the leader’s values to the corporate culture and the final goal to be achieve. Nevertheless this is not that easy, changing behavior takes time, motivation, training, coaching and real commitment starting from the managerial levels to production ones, sharing enough information among members.

“When I reflect on what makes an
outstanding organization,
I keep coming back to the
effectiveness of our people
individually and collectively.
Long-term success has to have a
solid foundation built on
principles and values
that act as a centre of gravity.”


John McFarlane, Chief Executive Officer,
ANZ Bank, Melbourne, Australia.

Can it be modify?





Case of Study : Collaborative Tools: Building a Culture of Knowledge Sharing


• Additional References:
• The New CEO: http: //proquest.umi.com.ezproxy.eafit.edu.co/pqdweb?did=2100654341&sid=7&Fmt=2&clientId=65927&RQT=309&VName=PQD
• http://www.skyisthelimit.org/ctt.html