Japanese Organizational Development
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Japanese Organizational Development in America
Even though the Mazda plant placed great emphasis on teamwork, personnel problems were still serious because there were major differences in the management styles of Japanese and American managers. The Japanese executives failed to consider the inherent differences in American and Japanese cultures. As noted in an article on GLOCOM Platform website dated August 2001, Yoichi Morishita (Chairman, Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd) states, "In Japanese corporations, especially manufacturing, there is a sense of unity, which has be fostered beyond the demarcation between employers and employees. This is participatory management, unifying the efforts of employers and employees who share the same management ideals". Japanese executives at the Mazda plant felt that after carefully and painstakingly selecting the 1300 employees out of 100,000 those employees would embrace their management style. That embracement failed to take place, creating problems Japanese executives didn't anticipate or know how to deal with. The Japanese executives at Flat Rock demonstrated this when their response to employee complaints was to lambaste workers for lack of dedication.
Setting up the Plant
In setting up the plant at Flat Rock, Japanese executives tried to create a traditional Japanese work environment. In a fall 1998 article on The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) website, John Doering, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, "Traditional Japanese management policies include lifetime employment, in-house labor unions, the seniority system and quotas to maintain a share of the market...