Managing the Managers: Japanese Management Strategies in the USA
研究了日本跨国公司在美国子公司中管理美国经理的困难，通过34次访谈发现管理风格受总经理国籍、双文化偏好、预算控制等因素影响。
One of the greatest difficulties Japanese multinationals have had is managing American managers in their US subsidiaries. The reason for this is fundamental and profound: Americans and Japanese conceive of management very differently and have strikingly different conceptions of themselves as managers and of correct management practice. We do two things in this paper. First, borrowing from social psychology, we explore the idea of the ‘management self’. Second, we report our research on management self‐conception and style in Japanese‐owned factories or ‘transplants’ in the USA. The research reports the results of 34 interviews conducted with 19 US and Japanese managers in three electronics transplants. Each factory had adopted different combinations or ‘hybridizations’ of the management styles of the two countries. The three factories had very different characters. One was dominated by Japanese management practice, another by American practice, and the third was a hybrid of the two styles. We found four factors critical determinants of management style: the nationality of the general manager, a stated preference (or lack thereof) for bicultural management, control over the budget‐setting process, and the strength of the Japanese assignees