The workplace in different cultures

Shimada Haruo, a leading Japanese industrial relations scholar, has maintained that one cannot comprehend Japanese industrial and organizational practices without recognizing that Japanese managers regard human resources as the most critical asset affecting the performance of their enterprises. Therefore, management in large Japanese companies is deeply committed to developing and sustaining effective human resource and industrial relations practices. Many Japanese observers go on to argue that this assumption grows out of Japanese culture and traditions. Shimada points out, however, that this cultural thesis fails to explain the changes in management and labour practices that have occurred over the years. Thus, he and most other contemporary scholars of Japanese practices stress the interactions of cultural, economic, and political events that shape organizational relations in the country’s industries.

Japanese culture places a high value on family relations and obligations, and some analysts claim that this family model carries over into the workplace. Employers are expected to show the same regard for their workers as a parent shows for other family members. Unity within the firm becomes a central value and corporate objective. In turn, employees are expected to show strong loyalty to their employer. It should be noted, however, that employment relations can be quite different in the smaller Japanese firms that supply the giant producers and exporters. The smaller companies have a tenuous existence and cannot guarantee secure employment or make substantial investments in employee training.

Employees in large Japanese firms exhibit fewer traces of individualism and place more emphasis on group relationships in the design of work and in their day-to-day workplace interactions, especially when compared to their Western counterparts. Direct conflict in organizational decision making is discouraged in favour of a more informal group consensus building. Authority is respected so highly that the outcomes of group problem-solving tasks will tend to reflect the views or preferences of senior managers.

From the early days of industrialization, Japanese employers, labour leaders, and bureaucrats were divided over whether Western-style conflicts between management and labour were inevitable and whether Western models of unionization and dispute resolution were appropriate models for Japan. Many employers (and, in the nationalistic l930s, some labour leaders) argued that Japan’s “beautiful customs” of benevolence from superiors and loyalty from subordinates made the Japanese family a more appropriate model for industrial enterprise. Between l920 and l93l government policymakers brought forward eight proposals to provide a legal framework for the establishment of labour unions, but each was defeated by vigorous opposition from employer associations and politicians. At its peak in l93l, the union movement had reached only 7.9 percent of the total industrial labour force. Large-scale enterprises were particularly successful in forestalling the formation of unions, and several developed alternative “Japanist” models of paternalistic management. With the outbreak of World War II, the union movement was brought to a halt.

Japan’s rapid economic growth from the mid-1950s through the 1980s propelled its industrial relations and organizational practices into the centre of international attention and debate. Three interrelated features of the system have attracted the most attention: (1) enterprise unions, (2) high levels of labour–management cooperation and cross-functional problem solving, and (3) lifetime employment security.

In the immediate postwar period the lifting of restrictions on unionization resulted in a wave of labour activism and unrest. Alarmed by the radicalism of the industrial union movement and the active involvement of the Communist Party at the movement’s national level, the Japanese government and the American occupation authorities launched a counteroffensive (the “Red Purge” of l947–48) to deny union rights to Communist-backed organizations. The newly formed Japan Federation of Employers’ Associations (Nikkeiren) embarked on a campaign to form moderate, anti-Communist enterprise unions that included lower level management personnel as well as production workers.

Employers made important concessions to the labour movement, including employment security, seniority-based wage systems, and twice-yearly bonuses negotiated each year along with base-pay increases. These accommodations, along with the cultural traditions that influenced behaviour at the workplace, shaped the large-scale enterprises that led Japan’s remarkable economic growth from the mid-l950s to the mid-l970s. Even the slowdown in growth that followed the l973 Arab oil embargo did little to shake the implicit security of employment. Those industries that faced the most severe business declines—shipbuilding, steel, aluminum processing, and petrochemicals—softened the effects of layoffs through outplacement programs (often in cooperation with affiliated companies), government-subsidized retraining programs, and diversification.

Low levels of conflict, even in declining industries, are characteristic of the generally cooperative relationship between managers and workers in Japan’s large private-sector firms (it should be noted that these relations are more conflictual in the public sector). This may be the case because blue- and white-collar workers belong to the same union, meaning that there are fewer lines of demarcation between these groups. In most enterprises, for example, the scale of management bonuses is tied to the size of bonuses for blue-collar workers. Many senior Japanese executives served as union leaders in their companies at earlier stages in their careers.

In part because the union leader of today may well be the manager of tomorrow, large firms generally practice union–management consultation over broad strategic issues. They also cultivate employee participation in some problem solving and solicit recommendations for improving the workplace. Quality circles and employee suggestion systems are widespread. Problems in product and technological development are more easily identified and solved by employing cross-functional teams and by a career development strategy that provides engineers and managers with job experience in multiple functions, including working on the factory floor.