Japanese Human Resource Management Essay Research Paper

Japanese Human Resource Management Essay, Research Paper

Employee Performance in Japan: Evaluation and Reward

Postwar economic development provided quite and immense amount of status and income to the Japanese. Since the 1960s, close to 90% of the Japanese people consider themselves to fall somewhere in the middle-class according to a survey conducted by the Prime Minister s office. Today, status in society is determined mostly by one s employment. Out of the labor force that consists of more than 60 million people, 45 million of those are regular employees. And for those who are working in a large firm, they are usually hired at the time of school graduation and retire at the compulsory age of 60. This kind of long-term employment system makes employers feel that labor is more of a fixed cost than a variable cost.

Regular employment is not determined by a legal contract, but more in the style of a social relationship, where performance in a by-product of the whole process and not a cause and effect of getting paid. In western societies, industrial identity is more focused on skill, or what one does, but in Japan it is where the employee belongs, or which company he works in is the main concern.

Performance is not the purpose or goal of the Japanese firm, instead it is a corporate reality in itself. The Japanese firm also exists in two levels, one which lies in the firm and one that lies outside the firm. Within the firm, the Japanese company tends to be a much more homogeneous group compared to its western counterpart. Large firms hire their workforce, mainly university graduates, from preferred schools to which they subtly assign quotas. These new recruits are hired for their potential. Training and development are essentially an internal affair which the firm is responsible for. This would lead to a system of job rotation and on the job training which is further nurtured by the classic Japanese system between junior and senior (sempai-kohai) found ubiquitously in Japanese society. The firm invests heavily on training generalists, or company specific skills in the sense that any employee should adept all the skills needed for the task assigned to the group, and that the overall work organization be as flexible to allow innovation, maintain internal competition and promote participation.

Outside of the firm, there is a vast network of banks and other companies that the Japanese firm is vigorously connected to. This is commonly known as Keiretsu or a type of inter-personal relationship amongst various levels of the business. The regular workforce is thus the main core of stakeholders, the stake being corporate survival and thus their own. Under the Japanese system which emphasizes lifetime employment as one of its unique traits, companies produce workers who have company specific skills This means that mergers and acquisitions are not much favored in Japan for the obvious reason that diverse corporate cultures are difficult to combine harmoniously. The people working in a company that is being bought over has serious problems because his skills is not easily allocated in a different company even though it might be the case that they are in the same industry.

Individual performance evaluation is a long-term basis and thus much less about short-term results and more about a steady improvement of one s potential. This evaluation is made by numerous superiors who themselves at one time were the subordinates, assuming that both the appraiser and the appraised have and will work for quite some time. Evaluation is for two related purposes, promotion and remuneration. It is then a complex task that can be handled neither by an individual superior nor on the basis of short-term considerations. It can only be handled over time and collectively. It is no accident that managerial experience with human resources is valued substantially higher in Japan than in the West. Japanese CEO s regard experience in human resource very highly. Whereas other corporate functions can turn to numerical data to outline experience, experience of human resources is more of an art than just numbers. This is especially true in Japan where human resources are not managed by the organization as a factor that is placed in and out of the labor market but are instead recruited for their potential and constantly upgraded through training and development.

In Japanese companies, the major incentive for a worker is promotion from within, a competitive process reflecting the merit in years, otherwise known as nenko , namely the years spent in the enterprise and the accumulated experience of both corporate human and material resources. Competition among peers is pretty severe. The above-average performer is promoted two or three years earlier than his peers. On the other hand, the below-average performer sees the pace of promotion slowing down and soon reaches the zenith of his career at section chief. As in general in Japanese society, authority over people tends to be looked at as a bad thing. The decision-making process in Japanese industry puts successful managers more in a role of coordinator who promotes communication and cooperation than supervisor who enforces rules and procedures. Titles are valued more for their social prestige than for the formal authority they give. The purpose is to lengthen the hierarchical ladder and please more employees.

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