The big difference of management style between Japan and Europe appears in its way of thinking. Japanese people think
We have to unite and support each other in priority to maintaining harmony
On the contrary, European think like
A team needs to be the one providing individuals more benefits more quickly
A company in Europe tend to like drawing people who have completely different skills and charactors individually into one team and integrating completely different values. Therefore, a conflict frequently happens in a team and it is pretty natural if a team doesn’t staisfy one memeber’s requirement which was one of the conditions to join a team, he/she drastically leaves a team even during the project.
Most of the members looked superior have different skills individually and things they are asked to do is entirely different from each other. Education, rules that people believe and sense of values and other so many things are far different from Japanese ones. European company think that diversity is the most important factor to support a team in a project.
The primary task of a team leader in Europe is to accomplish a mission as taking care of and respecting team member’s individual sense of value and requirements. In Europe, individual thoughts are respected the most and the reason that people belong to the team prioritize how much benefits they can get by joining the team. To keep staying on a team, you have to be happy, you have to be given a place to make the most of your skills, you have to do something interesting to you. European people think it natural to require a company to satisfy all those conditions before joining the team.
Japanese people look this European sense of value in a self-centeredness way. Japanese have their unique common sense that they keep their pace with other ones to maintain good harmony because they are educated that camaraderie is the most important factor to proceed with a project.
Japanese company’s personnel policy tends to put more weight on how well you can get along with other colleagues than whether you have quite good skill for the team. Japanese team-membership policy naturally force people to do something which nobody wants to do in tacit understanding and team members accept this condition like it cannot be helped. So many tasks are accomplished with their sense of duty. Japanese team doesn’t collapse and is controlled easily.
Moreover, the state that interactive information-sharing penetrate thoroughly among team members is the proof that team members respect each other. Japanese people have strong intention to share necessary and advantageous information among every one of members and this factor makes Japanese economic raise up. European companies focus their attention on improving information sharing among team-members but it does’t really work well and it is difficult to reform worker’s consciousness as Japanese companies do as a matter of fact because for European people, information need to be principally secret unless it’s really necessary. They have a concern that once the information is open to others, a rival may take advantage of information they have and steal a march on them. As a result, telling someone information is thought to put you in a bad position.
Japanese people’s strength is open-minded character based on group-oriented sense. Wide variety of Japanese food tells us unique Japanese behavior patters like “if everyone eat it, I eat it” although the food is not interesting to them, or their favorite.
When I look Japanese tourist enjoying overseas traveling, even if very unique local foods that they haven’t eaten so far in their lives, they enjoy tasting the foreign foods without resistance. This behavior helps develop Japanese food industry. On the contrary, European people thinks that moving by themselves have a lot of latitude and I think it actually has a tendency to be difficult for them to widen their activity range.
European people tend to decide to do something by whether they like it , and whether they already know it.
The problem of Japanese style teamwork
Japanese people is a slave to an obsession that everyone should do the same things. Especially, a team leader has much stronger obsession than any other members. For example, in order to let team members learn the same things, every one of members took the same lecture for many hours. And on top of it, there are some team members who don’t use what they learnt from a lecture on their tasks.
Japanese companies tend to assign the tasks to a person who haven’t experienced doing it before because he/she is one of their team member. Surely, Japanese companies have had budget and time to train employee so far. However, the times have changed. In Europe, if a company need to prepare homepage, it hires a professional web designer and prioritizes reasonability and productivity to the solution. Even if its cost get higher than ever temporarily, European company know this way will accomplish the project quickly without mistakes.
Japanese people who have strong camaraderie tend to be concerned about leaving an assignment of the project to outsider. Japanese team should be more open to hiring experts.
Japanee team doesn’t make the most of its members’ ability to the right place because excessive groupism interrupts. The biggest problem is that a Japanese company have strong tendency no to be able to trust young people’s ability and strength.
Japanese company’s upper management is worried more about internal conflicts and negative influence by singling out young member to a primary post. For example, when newly employing someone, even though the hired employee have studied English for so long, a Japanese company assigns the employee to accounting section which has nothing to do with what he/she has been doing so far and a company ends up making employee leave a company.
A Japanese company waste too much labor costs as a result because it can’t assign right person to right place. In Japan, there is an atmosphere that people are allowed to assert their opinions after making as good results as a company recognizes but if a person not in the right place can’t make good result in spite of impressive effort, he/she needs to bear and accept the situation silently. This is a big problem of human resources. A company need to find out employee’s ability and assign him/her to the right place.