Japanese Employees: A Case Study

Nowadays, there are many foreign employees working at our country which is Malaysia. Therefore, our company is going to improve the management system for the foreign employees which are Japanese to make the working process become more success. As an International Business Development Manager of the company, we need to train, lead and motivate the host country employees by certain ways.

Leadership is the ability to influence other and effectiveness of the perceptions of employees. So the manager needs to adjust their leadership behavior as part of their cultural adaption in order to effectively lead their local operation. As a manager, we can prefer to use paternalistic leadership style to lead the Japanese employees because paternalistic leadership

As a manger, we need to motivate the Japanese employees to ensure the employees achieve the company goals. According to Hostede’s five natural cultural dimensions, the power distance of Japan is high. The employees will reply more on manager’s decision and attitudes in their working more than themselves. Therefore the manager can motivate the Japanese employees by an unequal power distribution. Hence, the higher the power distance between employees and manager, the more effectively the manager to motivate the employees. (Patrick Rau, Jun Liu, Christian Juzek, and Christoph 2013,) Besides that, Japan is a collectivist community, so we can motivate the employees by providing group performance rewards or bonuses. This can lead the employees to build a good relationship between each other when competing for the reward. Not only that, less squabbling and more team work will occur when offer the group rewards

So we can apply Hosfstede’s cultural values to the design and delivery of training. In Hosfstede’s term, the power distance of Japan is considered high. The Japanese employees more likely to follow manager’s decision and not much questioned. Therefore, we can use the didactic methods to train the Japanese employees. Didactic method is a teaching method that using a consistent educational or scientific approach to engage the employee’s mind. In this teaching method, the trainer gives instruction, command and provides information to the employees and the employees are listening and memorizing the content. Besides that, the information or knowledge provide by the trainer is not questioned because the trainer is trusted to know what is the best for the