United States Vs Japanese Style of Management Japan, today is one of the super economic powers in the world. Japan had to start its development process from the scratch after losing the 1945 war. Its economic environment and infrastructure was destroyed and dominated by other powerful countries. The economic conditions worsened the condition of people and they could not even afford the basic necessities of life. Nevertheless, the war could not affect people’s enthusiasm and energy about their social cultural value system and their exceptional efforts towards their national development made them get back to life.
Characteristics of Japanese style of management as offered by Ouchi in his book, “Theory Z, seven key characteristics of Japanese organization” are as followed:
1. Life time employment 2. Slow evaluation and promotion of employees 3. Non specialized career paths 4. Implicit control mechanism 5. Collective decision making 6. Collective responsibility 7. Holistic concern (full employer-employee relationship) Japanese Managers place more emphasis on two way communication, strong interdepartmental relationship and paternalistic orientation. Whereas the US managers focus more on supervisory style, using best decision making skills and an efficient control mechanism. Also the Japanese managers consider their business units to be more effective than their counterparts in US. Communication in Japanese firms is more ‘open’ and mostly face to face by reducing barriers to enable effective flow of information. Openness of communication provides support for strong feelings and bonding with other employees. Paternalistic orientation is a very father-like orientation, which make organization’s employees feel as though they have some say in the organizational affairs. Japanese firms are also more considerate to the concerns and activities of employees outside their workplace. They try to maintain group harmony, employee loyalty and co-operation.
In contrast, the United States management style is best described as ‘mostly characterized by supervisory style stressing more on theory X, task oriented and transactional leadership methods. US managers are more interested in results than processes and they tend to be less participative than Japanese managers with respect to decision making. US managers follow a top-down approach for decision making where the top management makes a decision and delegates it to the subordinates. Also US management works on the idea that employees are semi variable assets and can be hired and fired as required.
Therefore, this was just a comparison between the Japanese and US management styles and none of these may be termed as ‘best’, because a management styles varies from country to country and organization to organization.
Source: http://www.researchomatic.com/american-and-japanese-executives-a-comparison155783.html