Arab Academy for Science and Technology

Graduate School of Business

Case Study Analysis

(Case: There Are Teams, and There Are Teams)

Teamwork perception within the American Culture and the Japanese Culture

Prepared By:
Yasser Salah Moustafa
MBA 2nd – Class D

BIS 962: Organizational Behavior Course

Dr. Gehan Osman
First: Introduction (Brief about the Case) :
Considering Globalization as a fact to deal with in every aspect of life, it can be easily said that Globalization is the national
language of planet earth, and one of the main fields that such terminology affect.
Thus, the case highlight one mostly discussed topics about teamwork in two different management styles (The American way of
management) and the (Japanese way of Management), identifying major perceptions and beliefs in both cultures, and how that
would reflect very significantly on how team works handle tasks, share their opinions towards certain issues, and defining causes
of problems and way they treat or rationalize a certain business case.

Second: Highlighting key differences between American and Japanese Management style and
Teamwork perception :
Before going analyzing and answering the questions that the case tackle, let me first outline common understanding base for both
management styles, the American and the Japanese.

The American Management Style:

The American management pattern is mostly characterized by supervisory style stressing more Theory X type, task-oriented. In
their decision making, American managers emphasize concrete results rather than the process. Additionally, they make decisions
in a less participative fashion than do Japanese.
Individual responsibility and top-down decision making appear to be common features of the American system.
Furthermore, the U.S. management favors a control mechanism based on close supervision and an explicit formal control pattern.
American are performances oriented unlike Japanese who are perfectionist.

The Japanese Management Style:

One of the salient characteristics of Japanese management is that communication in Japanese organizations appears to be open
and mostly face-to-face thereby minimizing barriers to effective information flow. Moreover, interdepartmental interactions are
intensive in Japanese organizations. Japanese manager are attentive to interdepartmental dependency and cooperation.
The core of what is known as the Japanese style of management comes from an emphasis in Japanese society on building
consensus in group decision making. In Japanese business, the group comes before the individual.
In his book, (Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Management Challenge), William Ouchi noted the
following characteristics of Japanese organizations: lifetime employments, slow employee evaluation and promotion, no
specialized career paths, implicit control mechanisms, collective decision making, collective responsibility, and holistic concern
for the employee as a person.

Third: Case Question One

a. How to make teams having Japanese subordinates more effective?

In light of the collectivist cultural background of the Japanese employees and it’s differences with the American one, and how
they would sight the most reliable and effective teamwork environment that would respect their perceptions, needs, and personal
traits, yet integrated with the organizations goals, I would propose a model that tend to blend different factors and perceptions of
Japanese culture with nowadays new trends of productive and results oriented management, and try to avoid the most commonly
defeats or cons of the Japanese teamwork’s traits like (slow evaluation and promotion of employees, non-specialized career paths,
implicit control mechanism, collective decision making, and collective responsibility)
I would propose a name for this model to be (Production Performance Driven by Teamwork Collaboration), which in parts to be
driven from the famous Team Effectiveness Model proposed in Robbines| Judge Book (Organizational Behavior)
Some characteristics of this model which will try to focus on initiating Japanese employees traits and encourage creative ideas
and opinions:
- Enhancing decision making process
- Focus on developing sense of proposing creative ideas, different visions towards problems
- Diversity of reasonability through rotation programs within the organization departments
- Skills diversity by technical training, to avoid
- Functional maximization in order to improve results
- More focus on the behavioral manners rather then personality changes
- Create several incentives models suitable and depending on the roles of every team member rather then unify those
incentives within all team members
- Work on the diversity of the team members, as there is a lot of research evidence that diverse teams performs better (e.g.
integrating members from other cultural background from other offices to work close with the Japanese team members)
- Solve problems and make decisions on a timely basis, to avoid vague results and un-focused performance
- Enhancing leadership within the teamwork and characterize every member with a certain role
- Provide development opportunities for team members
b. Developing Cross functional team working on new product for both U.S. and Jap. Market, and how effective to be this team
In order to enhance and develop an effective and efficient Cross-Functional Team towards a product to be suitable to both
markets, I would recommend:
- First to make sure of the compatibility of the team members towards clear understanding of the goal of this team, about
how the new product will fulfill cultural needs and traits for both market
- Special focus on the team composition and addressing the ability and personality of the team members, yet allocation of
roles and responsibilities in order to get the most comprehensive vision of both markets
- Emphasize the role of sharing trust between the team members
- Share information, data and trends among the members towards the two markets and emphasizing the most issues that
will shape the product
- Create a common agreeable plan and purpose, which should dynamically interact with market needs. It’s about
developing a vision or master plan that will drive the purpose of the team
- Focus on how to localize the product to be suitable yet to be driven by both markets
- Develop new ideas, creative, smart and functional for both markets
- Much important, is to get In touch with customers, learn from facts and learn from competitors as well
- Focus on communication and melting down any boundaries that might not easy the communication means towards
understanding the personality orientation of the customers
- Diversify of team members by making use of what so called “ Organization Demography” which will help adopt
different point of views in one plan
- Avoiding team peer pressure
- Emphasize decision making process
- Building team work design models, by working together and taking collective responsibility for completing significant
tasks, yet enhance the ability to complete a whole and identifiable task

All, in all, from my standing point of view, using cross-functional teams is very essential, in attaining such plans for producing
new products that needs to be adopted to more then one market, especially when the product is targeted to markets like American
or the Japanese market, that everyone of them has it’s own characteristics that might not suite the other.
By the end of the day, any training or any organization team developing plans, should target the organization goals, vision, and
results towards profits in a reliable way.

Fourth: Case Question Two

My reaction towards Japanese methodology of team work could be split into two parts, I would say that I do agree to the first
phrase, but would question the second part.
Let’s look at the first phrase of the statement “Japanese are more interested in everyone in the team being cooperative and
helpful”
Most OB theories regarding team work and group work, stress on the advantages of teamwork, which generates positive synergy
through coordinated effort, which in turn will help increasing organization performance and yet could generate greater outputs
with no increase in inputs
It’s obvious that the Japanese understanding of teamwork and its importance had created fabulous milestones in there economic
growth throughout the past decades, and the Japanese case was ultimately as case to analysis in many western organization
specially when this comes to lead production process and “just-in-time” production.
One of the major factors of the Japanese management system is their emphasis on teamwork, rather than individual job tasks.
Teamwork helps to make jobs wider in scope and eliminate multiple job descriptions, while emphasizing flexibility, rather than
specialization. Japan also feels that teamwork increases productivity because whenever problems arise workers are allowed to
stop the line and work together to solve problems, without evoking any disciplinary action.

But on the other side let’s look to the second phrase of the statement “Harmony is more important than productivity”
Definitely I might question this part, even though in Japanese culture, a fear of shame and a value of harmony have created
Japanese who are group-oriented, however, the Japanese can do nothing by themselves and lack independence and individuality.
It’s important for any organization in the widely disturbance markets world wide, and lack of natural resources, and tough market
competition, organizations try always to focus on developing plans to increase performance and productivity.
I can imagine the case of high level of harmony between teamwork without real impact of results and productivity, especially in
country like Egypt which needs to focus on productivity and creating diverse opportunities for organizations locally and
internationally.
I would re-phrase the statement to be “Teamwork Harmony is the high speed way for productivity”, by the end of the day,
effectiveness of team work should be used as tool for increasing performance and productivity rates.
Fifth: Case Question Three
Although Japanese used and developed teamwork methodology, hence they have economic problem…why?

According to Richard Katz, Japan’s problem during the last decade has been "continuing the same patterns after the catch-up era
was over". Japanese employees got well adjusted to a stable relationship during the high growth years that continued almost
relentlessly until the burst of the bubble. Now, as the high growth years are far gone, Japanese management-labor relations will
slowly have to adjust to this new reality.
It must also be noted that Japanese group ethics only apply to groups inside Japanese society or within the sphere of Japanese
ethical expectations, this had created miscommunication issues and un-effective interaction between group members from
different cultural backgrounds, especially for Japanese organizations working abroad.
Employees or managers may not offer the same ethical consideration to "alien – other cultures" groups, such as rival corporations,
foreign nations or foreign nationals. Such a dichotomy between the value of things Japanese and non-Japanese may provide a
rationale for bad ethical behavior, which eventually impacted on Japanese organization performance on the international markets.

Some of the major factors that impacted the declining of teamwork in Japanese organization and economics:
- low rates of immigrants to Japan, which in was reflected on the un-diversity levels within organizations team works
- loose HR concepts, that didn’t recognize incentives and rewarding variations between employees
- Hierarchy in supervisory positions which intern reflected in salary schemes among managers and there sub-ordinates,
were top manages in typical Japanese organizations opt to 20 times there low level employees, which was in contract
about 120 in the American organizations
- Long term/live employment traits, that had illuminated the introducing of more young employees with new trends of
perceptions.

What could be my elaboration to the CEO, that using teams might benefit the organization, despite the prolonged Japanese
competitive problems, and how that will help to overcome this obstacle for Japanese org. culture

My elaboration would be through emphasizing certain points that would help make use of the deep impact of teamwork
methodology in the Japanese culture, yet enhancing other several down points in the Japanese teamwork perceptions, some of
which:
- Make use of the conscientiousness personality of the Japanese employees, that would definitely impact the performance
of the teamwork
- Make use of the great deal of process improvements methodology towards organization operations
- Introducing dynamic and diverse evaluation models that would focus more on the individual performance within the
group, yet get use of the Japanese dedication habits
- Energize the internal competition within the organization departments by introducing suitable incentive programs
- Make use of the high communication, sharing and supporting environment found in the Japanese teamwork culture
- Additionally, I would try to work on a context pattern that would blend characteristics of the Japanese teamwork cultural
traits with American results orientation culture, with continuous trainings, diverse responsibility, and would always
relate there performance to goals attaining.

Sixth: Conclusion
Such exchanges of managerial and teamwork practices between nations do not mean that differences in management styles will
disappear one day. As long as we have different cultures, management systems as a by-product of culture will manifest unique
characteristics in given country. Therefore, we need further studies to examine similarities and differences in managerial styles
and teamwork across nations.

References:
- Global Adaptation of Japanese Management Practices: What You May Be Able To Adopt – (By - Professor Mayumi
Otsubo)
- Team work in Japan “Evolution as fact or fiction” (By - Anne Sey)
- The Future of Japanese-Style Human Resources Management in America (By - Taylor Christine Grayson)
- Organization Behavior (By – Robbins | Judge)
- Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Management Challenge (By - William Ouchi)
- The group oriented Japanese (By - Naoko Taguchi)
- Balancing economic growth with well-being: Implication of the Japanese experience (By - Takashi Omori)