Japanese Management Style

This research reviews the Japanese style of manufacturing management. Management problem solving approaches, leadership styles, worker attitudes and thinking processes, and inventory and production management techniques are addressed. The approach in this review to the development of an understanding of the Japanese style of management is to compare Japanese managerial practices with American managerial practices.

Japanese managers take the theories they find and put them to use (Chen, 1995, pp. 180-196). A theory of work as meaningful living prepares employees for socialization into groups, as does the belief that the company has a legitimate social mission. Powerful managers who demand that employees participate and do not worry about little mistakes motivate the development a strong team spirit. The same team approach occurs, however, in American companies that cultivate the same ideas about work, the company, power, and failure.

These ideas are not strange to most Americans (Sullivan, 1992, pp. 66-87). They have just been strange to American managerial elites, and to the doctrinaire economists who provide them with theories. The American managerial elites and their supporting economists see work as a disutility, the company as a wealth-generating machine for owners, managing as the implementation of behaviorist stimulus-response processes, a worker as a kind of purposeful pigeon, failure as a spur to competitiveness, and groups as bar

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aving done. Put more concretely, a Japanese company produces products while an American firm produces profits. At times, the Japanese are better at manufacturing than they are at marketing, and one reason is that maintaining the ongoing organizational life of the factory often is a more important goal than reaping profits from selling the product. Creating orderly, meaningful work, in theory at least, is what a Japanese company does. When one considers the art of managing, a set of ideas supporting this vision emerges. Managing is the benevolent use of power to foster order and harmony. The power may be misused by Japanese executives at times, but its underlying function is to create socially sanctioned control and social welfare. Japanese management is the continual exercise of power and the maintenance of control to establish an order in which work can be done efficiently without endless negotiations between superiors and subordinates (Chen, 1995, pp. 180-196). Society benefits from this control focus and responds by providing Japanese managers with a freedom of action unavailable in other countries. Employees are protected by rules of employment, but unions are weak. Consumers clamor for lower prices, but the govern

Category: Foreign - J