Topic 6: East Asia: Japanese and Korean management styles

Key words: East Asia; management style; religion; Buddhism; Confucianism, Management style, Japanese style, Korean style


SUMMARY:


The asian business and country members of this region, are becoming part of actual studies, due to the concept of globalization, the fast economic growth and their succesful model adopted by companies of this region that share some characteristics of their culture and are transfered to their management styles.
For this reason, nowadays we are facing with a controversy: Globalization vs. Convergence.
Convergence may be defined as the acceptance of different cultures around the world, and the creation of awareness allowing and adopting some concepts from successful models (specially of developed countries), according the text What Makes Management Style Similar and Distinct Across Borders? Growth, Experience and Culture in Korean and Japanese Firms, written by Lee, Thomas & Choe.
We can see the prevalence of Japanese model in Asia, and the American model in Western.


Now, we are going to explain the Japanese management style and why it is considered as a pattern in korean styles and other asian countries: It is very important to clarify to the lectors that not all the japanese companies are alike. Japanese market is growing and the maket share must be consistent with log-term and maximization of value. Relationship biuldings are very important for almost every east asian coultures, and they are the basis for Japanese behavior with their custommers and suppliers, and this variable, makes this management style more alike with group loyalty. They take into account both custommers and competitors as important factors for decision-making process.

In the other side, lets explain the Korean management style: Korean style has many congruent factors with Japanese one, due to the historical background of both countries. Korea was a japanese colony and then, they adopted the japanese style. Korea has been growing more tha Japan and other similar countries, and this is because the leadership tasks  and the economic planning have been very well oriented by the government.This kind of government have supported the companies members of the "Chaebol", similar with the "Zaibatsu" of Japan.
Korean management culture adopt some principles from confusianism and budism.


Differences of Japanese and Korean management styles:

The national management system is influenced by

* National culture (laws, legal, economic and political variables)

* Development, evolution and sophisticaion of procesess (degree of internationalization)

Internationalization means for the companies, that they have to be stronger in terms of competition, improving their managerial operations, increasing efficiency and opportunities, and common managerial problems (independent of nationality) are:

-Intensification of competition

-Directing activities of subordinates

-Difficulty of coordination (sub-units)

Topic 4: Communication + Virtual Teams

SUMMARY:



COMMUNICATION is an inherent and necessary process of individuals in order to transfer messages and social interaction. This process requires the development of specific skills to communicate with others: They need to have a common language and an implicit code of symbols and interpretations. Despite the technological advantages today, communication still being the basis for the accomplishment of every goals in organizational approaches because it is the base for relationships building and to maintain them.


This process involves 4 principal actors: The communicator, The receiver, Perceptual screens (many variables may change the meaning of the message), the message.

Taken from: http://www.owatonna.k12.mn.us/Classroom/OJHS/Outback/ezeman/communication_skills_graded.jpg

Taken from: http://www.mbaknol.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/communication-process-mbaknol.gif

Feedback is the most important and delicate step within the communicatiuon process because the person who communicates something, needs to be sure that the message sent was the message received.

Reflective Listening:

1. Listening

2. Repeating back the hard messages

3. Correct innacuracies

We must be interacting all the time in order to be sure that we are talking about the same theme, and reduce the risk of perceptual distorsions.

Verbal response to reflective listening:

- Affirming

- Paraphrasing

- Clarify

- Silence

- Eye contact

- Reflecting core feelings

COMMUNICATION AND EFFECTIVE MANAGERS:

Within the organizations we can find different kind of actors that influence the information spreaded and the quality of this information.  The challenges that managers encounter often are caused by a breakdown in the communication process. For example, managers may struggle with communicating expectations, dealing with difficult people and situations, delegating work,and a wide variety of other common worksite challenges.

"For example, the author explains how a company in California fosters a humorous and positive environment that motivates clients to achieve their objectives. By using laughing moments, this company creates a relaxed, educational, and pleasurable work environment. When people laugh together, they create shared moments and a strong, trusting, team-focused environment." ( ProQuest database:"The communication problem solver",Nannette Rundle Carroll).

Types of communication actors:

* Expressive speakers

* Emphatetic listeners

* Persuasive leaders

* Sensitivity to feelings

* Informative managers

To reach an effetive communication process, we ha to take into account those principles: clarity, objectives, understanding, consistency, completeness.

However, we have to deal with some barries and obstacles, daily:

Language barriers: Common language?

Semantic barriers: Different meanings

Poor Vocabulary: For detailed communication

Phsysical barriers: Noise, time, distance, age and gender

Social.Psychologicals barriers: Status, attitudes and values, different perceptions, inference,abstracting, close-mindness, ditorsion, bad listening.

SUPPORTING VIDEOS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCMDAYPUo30 :

Despair Inc.™: Why Workplace "Communication" Is Overrated

Communication is a process that allows organisations to send/receive messages within their own boundaries but also to interact with outside entities (customers, suppliers, the media, etc.). Messages are send/received not only through oral and written statements, there are many channels and ways that need to be considered when discussing effective organisational communication. In that sense, the use of sounds has become increasingly important.

Topic 3 - Motivation

SUMMARY:
We can define MOTIVATION as the activation that a person has in order to achieve a goal oriented behavior. What moves to one person to do something or act in a specific way. We are going to focus our research in the factors that direct the human behavior (internal and external).


We have to take into account that motivations are different of stimulus. Maslow's hierarchy of needs, Alderfer's ERG theory, Herzeberg's motivator-hygiene theory (Herzeberg's dual factors theory), and McClelland's learned needs or three-needs theory are some of the major content theories.
Max Weber


Sigmund Freud


• Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs: This author assumes 5 levels of needs of individuals, and proposes a hierarchy between them, starting with the most basic needs that people need in order to survive, and ending with the highest level of needs that cannot be reached even. “man is a perpetually wanting animal” (MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS: “Employees motivation theories developed at an international level”).

Taken from: http://www.colinchristianson.com/?tag=maslows-hierarchy

When one need is accomplished, people look for a higher level of the hierarchy (strict order of needs).

• Two factors Theory (Frederick Hezberg): Explains the sources of professional satisfaction or dissatisfaction, and it is related with the context, company policy, salary. Etc.


• Theory X and Y (Douglas Mc Gregor): Proposes two groups of persons within a group or organization:


-X: Negligence, avoiding work, controlled, need punishments


-Y: Intellectual efforts, voluntary responsibilities, not forced


• ERG Theory: It applies the “Regression hypothesis”, and he accepts that different levels of needs of the Marlow’s hierarchy may take place at the same time, and if one need is not covered properly, individual could move down within the pyramid.


• Mc Clelland’s need Theory: Manage people and building relationships. This theory assumes that working place is not only for work.


• Equity Theory: It is very useful in organizational analysis, because it gets some basis for management because it accepts the people perceptions and gets some real motivations to work (the way that they are threatened in comparison with others).






QUESTIONS:


Hawthorne Studies and its importance for studying motivation at the workplace, its influence over diverse motivation theories.
 "The ”Hawthorne effect” is defined as the phenomenon in which subjects in behavioral studies change their performance in response to being observed." (Counseling in an Organization(1966) :Roethlisberger and William Dickson. Harvard business School webpage). 


The Hawthorne studies proposed the basis for human relations management because he recognizes that the employees are motivated by salary and economical retributions, but he adopt a new concept where the workers are motivated by social needs, further than economical ones (developing work relations and facing pressures put forth by coworkers). Despite the salary is an important variable for the successful work, it is even more important in a combination of responsibility, Recognition and respect, because When employees believe that their efforts are serving a deeper purpose, they are more motivated to produce.


Bringing Maslow and Herzberg's theories into the workplace, strategies for motivation can be implemented in order to meet people basic needs. When they met, difficult and challenging times can actually motivate workers to contribute at a higher level. Fundamentals like salary, breaks and favorable work conditions must be in place. In order to gain organizational loyalty, bonuses and healthcare plans can be motivating. Other factors include giving employees the opportunity to grow. This can occur through training and coaching, and relates to findings in the Hawthorne studies for driving efforts as well.


Organizations have to keep in mind that individuals (workers) behavior responses to s set of motivations that will influence in job performance, and this is the most complex task imposed to managers: How to motivate their workers?. And Hawthorne give them new variables and options to accomplish with this hard job, understanding that a person is not only an economic individual, but he has to cover more human needs related with job performance and job satisfaction.


“Elton Mayo examined the impact of work conditions in employee productivity. Elton Mayo started these experiments by examining the physical and environmental influences of the workplace (e.g. brightness of lights, humidity) and later, moved into the psychological aspects (e.g. breaks, group pressure, working hours, managerial leadership) and their impact on employee motivation as it applies to productivity.” (http://www.envisionsoftware.com/articles/Hawthorne_Effect.html).


Based on the class activity about "Flight 001: Motivating Employees"

¿Which motivation theory has the most relevance for understanding the behavior of Griffin and fostering her motivation at work?


This case is a proper example of the importance of motivation in the workplace. Griffin is an employee of the company and her job covered her basic needs (salary) and there were convergence with the economical retributions with her job; however, she felt that she was treated as a “number” and as a common employee for the company that has to accomplish some tasks and that’s it. This is the reason because she became to feel some dissatisfaction with her workplace and her boss.


This boss, failed in his managerial task, because they did not take into account the other levels of the human needs, such as self-esteem needs (brings to the workers status, responsibility and reputation), and self-actualization needs (brings to the workers personal growth).


In this case, the theory X and Y is presented the mostly, because we can see that this particular employee is characterized by belongs to the group of Y people: People at the company care about their position as important assets to get better results. The payment does not have a really influences under the worker’s motivations: They are looking for delegation and more participation within the company.


The reading is available at: Nelson, D.L. & Quick, J.C. 2010. Organizational Behavior: Science, The Real World and You. South-Western College Publication, 7th. Pp. 1178-179.

Topic 2 - Personality, Perception and Attribution + Attitudes and Values

Key words: Personality, Attribution, Perceptions, Interaction, Pygmalion effect, Interactional Psychology, Theoretical approaches, Expectations,
 SUMMARY:
We have to understand the individual as the origin of every study within the organization, because it is formed by different perceptions, personalities and perspectives.


We start saying that there are perceptions of things, values and tasks, as people within the organization and it depends of their own attitudes, values, ethics and skills. But the constant interaction of those differences, influence the organizational behavior in general (interactional psychology).
The concept of Personality, includes the individual characteristics of the human been, and it is determined by heredity or the personal experiences within a particular context or environment.


We can find many theoretical approaches of personality, but we are going to expose the most applicable in organizational behavior:


*Trait Theory: It assumes that different traits and characteristics of a human been, compose his own personality and his character. This theory proposes 5 types of personalities: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism , Openness


*Psychodynamic Theory: Key Concepts of Freuds Psychodynamic Theory


*Humanistic Theory: Need for self-actualization

*Integrative Approach: Assumes that the personality and their characteristics depend of the combination of individual factors (early years of life) and a set of situational variables.

Perceptions are the ways how the situations are perceived from different perspectives. They are also, the individual’s view of the world, and there are many perceptions as the number of persons in a specific situation. However, within the organization, people have to reach a “purple zone”, where perceptions of all the members of one group may interact and crate outputs.

The interaction and feedback between the perceiver and the target we can find some barriers that can damage the final message and the results of interaction. They could be: Stereotypes, errors, judgments, etc.


The perception principles are:


- Selective perception: People focus their attention in what is important for them the most.


- Stereotypes: They function as generalizations


- First impression error: Last opinions based on initial experiences


- Projection: People tend to overestimate the people who share their own beliefs.


- Self-fulfilling prophecy: Confirm perceiver’s expectations

Attributions refer to the causes of one thing that happen in a specific situation. Attributions might be internal (personality) or external (situation).


“Heider first made the argument that people tend to overweight internal, dispositional causes over external causes—this later became known as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977)”. (Source: Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 173–220). Orlando, FL: Academic Pre).


ATTITUDES: This concept may be defined as a psychological tendency (positive or negative), related with the perceptions of the individual, and influence the human been behavior. This concept is explained in a better way by the ABC model:


Affects: Emotional part, indicators and feelings


Behavioral intentions: Observed behavior


Cognition: Attitudes lies on personal beliefs and experiences.

Taken from: http://www.mikethementor.co.uk/images/CBC_ABC_model.gif

The attitudes are formed by direct experiences or social learning (culture, family, others).


In the organizational concern, “It relates to how you feel about your work and your approach towards work. Hence, work attitude behavior is intangible. You cannot see it. Your colleagues cannot see it. But people can feel it”. (“Work Attitude Behavior and Work Behavior Attitude – Are They The Same?”)


VALUES: It is related with HOW YOU SHOULD BEHAVE. Some cultures, groups and organization have their own code of values that may be used as a guide for their components. Instrumental values (Acceptable behaviors to achieve goals) and terminal values (Goals themselves).

QUESTIONS:



1. Please explain, using your own words, the concept of Pygmalion Effect.

Pygmalion effect can be defined as a perceptual tendency, which involves some actors in a specific process that requires a target's performance. This concept means: if the perceptions of one leader or perceiver are positive, then the outputs and results of some task will be positive too, and the target's performance will reach the proposed objectives. 
Those initial perceptions are influenced by internal factors, such as personal experiences, personality and beliefs of the perceiver, but also by external factors related with the context. 


* What are the potential implications, uses, or challenges that this effect may pose for organizations engaging into international operations that require the understanding of diverse cultural contexts? Can you use this concept to explain the relationship between national and organizational cultures?

Within the organization, this concept are focused on managerial tasks, because the managers are considered as the leaders of the organizations, and their perceptions (positive or negative) influece the most, the perceptions of their subordinates or their groups of work.
In the international scope, the are some challenges by the organizations and managers, and they are related with the diversity of cultures, because there are a lot of perceptions and differences in the workplaces today, and the principal challenge for the managers is to coordinate all of them, in order to generate value and create outputs for the company.
"Community development and leadership development are integrally intertwined. A leader cannot develop new leaders and keep them engaged without clear contributions to make to a greater good. A leader cannot have any enduring impact in a community without engaging its people directly in co-leadership in vision, design, and execution of efforts." (Retraining Ourselves in Thought and Action: A Thematic Exploration of Leadership Literature, David T Gortner. Anglican Theological Review. Evanston: Winter 2010, ProQuest database.).
 
The Pygmalion effect, related with the concept of national culture fits perfectly to explain the variations and the influence of internal and external factor within the organizations, because managers' behaviors and perceptions are influenced by internal perceptions and learnings that he got from their national culture and he makes value adopting those perceptions within the organizations and transfering them to the teamgroup and subordinates. Example: Chinese national culture of building relationships between cooworkers, is adopted at the workplace also, and it allows the target's performance and accomplishment of goals. 

Taken from: http://inwiki.pabo-inholland.nl/_media/pygmalion_effect.jpg?w=&h=&cache=cache

Topic 1 - Organizational behavior + national and organizational culture

Key Words: Organization, Individual behavior, norms, environment, national culture, organizational culture, globalization, groups, adaptation, consistency, cultural dimensions.

SUMMARY:
Individual is the basis for the analysis and the interaction of different individuals form a specific group that generally has common interests or a common goal as minimum.


People belong to a group because they have the need to perform, in order to accomplish with integration purposes (This is the motivation of the individual behavior) and those groups are constantly interacting each other (“group dynamics”). “Members in such a highly interconnected context are motivated to maintain a close relationship with other group members for task completion and goal achievement” .(Source: EBSCO database: Chun-Hsi Vivian Chen and Ya-Yun Tang: “Exploring the Mediating Effect of Group Cohesion in Multilevel Analysis”).


The human behavior is affected by a lot of variables such as:


*Internal Perspectives: Belong to the person as individual and they are inside each person, according their past experiences, thoughts, feelings and needs. They may be different due to the basis of each culture adopted in earlier years of the life.


*External Perspectives: They are outside the person and depend of the external events or environment.
We have to take into account both perspectives within an organization, because they might modify the performance of each employee or a specific group of employees. For example: If one person is low-paid by a company, this person will not be enough motivated to do his job, and this situation affects the quality of the job and then, the quality of the organization.


DEFINITION OF ORGANIZATION:


“Social unit of people systematically arranged and managed to meet a need or to pursue collective goals on a continuing basis. All organizations have a management structure that determines relationships between functions and positions, and subdivides and delegates roles, responsibilities, and authority to carry out defined tasks. Organizations are open systems in that they affect and are affected by the environment beyond their boundaries.” . (Source: www.BussinessDictionary.com)
Based on this definition, we can conclude
The organization may be compared as:


-Clockwork: Every part that composes it has to fit and has one specific task, in order to complete the organization’s goals.


-Snake pit: It is not an easy task: It is complex and has many daily obstacles.

All organizations have two factors that compose it as a whole and they are denominated: formal and informal. The first ones involve the visible part of the companies with their mission, vision, objectives proposed since the beginning, products and services offered by the company, symbols, language, ceremonies, etc; however, there are a lot of invisible factors that people can recognize only with they work for the company or interact with all members and experiences inside the company (feelings, attitudes, values and beliefs). The combination of all those components forms the organizational culture as a whole, and this is an important concept:


Organizational culture is “likely to how the organization makes decisions, communicates and structures its roles and relationships”(International management and culture” Chapter one) and this is what makes a company different from others, even if they offer the same products. For this reason, it is very hard to copy by the competence and it belongs to the competitive advantage of the organization and their members.


There are a lot of different values and perspectives within a company but the company have establish a model to be followed for all their components in order to achieve some goals; However, we can find some “patterns” in terms of a nation or country and it influences the company behavior very much: They share customs, values and common beliefs, even though there exist other factors as the external ones.


Many authors propose many theories about the cultural dimensions that we have to take into account when we study a specific culture, but we are going to adopt the Hofstede’s dimensions:
-Power Distance


-Individualism vs. Collectivism


-Masculinity vs. Feminity


-Uncertainty Avoidance


-Long term vs. Short term orientation

QUESTIONS:


1. Considering the conference "Dealing with Cultural Differences" by Nick B. Meyer, choose 1 cultural dimension and use an hypothetical but realistic situation - or real one - to illustrate the business implications of cultural differences. you may not use situations or examples already discussed in class or in the conference.


Nick B. Meyer is a specialist studying cultural dimensions and he says in his conference presented in the EAFIT University, that there is not a “world culture”, that this is a complex concept changing every days and everywhere. However, nowadays we have to be aware of those cultural changes due to the globalization processes. That is why he explains the cultural dimensions and how different countries have adopted their own but have introduced new elements as well. One of the most important is:


• Uncertainty avoidance: “It indicates to what extent a culture programs its members to feel either uncomfortable or comfortable in unstructured situations. Unstructured situations are novel, unknown, surprising, different from usual. Uncertainty avoiding cultures try to minimize the possibility of such situations by strict laws and rules, safety and security measures, and on the philosophical and religious level by a belief in absolute Truth; 'there can only be one Truth and we have it'. People in uncertainty avoiding countries are also more emotional, and motivated by inner nervous energy.” (Geert Hofstede™ Cultural Dimensions).

Illustrated examples: Israel is a county marked by many social and political disturbs, due to the immigration of Jewish people from many countries and the historical conflict with Arabian world for their territories and their culture maintenance. As we can see in the chart, this culture has a high degree of uncertainty related with future changes and future situations due to the historical context. People avoid taking future decisions because some factor as the war.

Taken from  http://www.geert-hofstede.com/hofstede_israel.shtml

Taken fromhttp://images.google.com.co/imgres?imgurl=http://decabo.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/foto-guerra-palestina-israel

 Taken from http://images.google.com.co/imgres?imgurl=http://www.soygik.com/wp-content/uploads

CORPORATE CULTURE IN THE ORGANIZATIONS


All organizations make part of certain type of environment that shares common characteristics or variables. However, it is not composed by only one or two or three actors, but is composed by a lot of organizations, variables and independent actors that affect the relationships, the internal policies and decisions within them as individuals.
Organizations are composed by individuals with different beliefs, customs and values, however, all the organizations need to have clear their own “style” that makes it different from other companies, that’s why I agree with the assumption that every organization has a corporate culture: They establish objectives and targets and they have to start to hire employees with common characteristics in order to achieve those proposals: that is why the companies take enough time to look and select their employees before hire them.


When people are working together they establish some ties that make them a group or team, looking for common goals; but not all the persons need to have the same attitudes and perspectives, they need to use those differences to reach a common proposal, and this I not an easy task, because the company must have a well structured framework to make this possible and this is one of the reason because we have to take into account that if one company is more complex and it has more employees and elements this organizational culture and code needs to be stronger than a simple and easy one.

It think that the organizational culture cannot change totally if we want to keep it strong, because if we do, the company would change their internal and external image and it would bring negative dissonances with their employees, their objectives and their performance in general. But the company needs to improve their culture all the time and it has to adapt it according the continuous changes around the new world, because there is an important concept called “competition” and “globalization”, within a bigger scope. But this concept is not new, Freeman (1892) wrote that there is not innovation without change and recently the specialists says: “A culture that spurs innovation allows for natural work teams to build as often called communities of practice joining people of congruent intellectual interests (Amin and Roberts, 2008). "It is very important to have internal partners ...,"

Taken from http://www.beyondlean.com/images/corporate%20culture%202.jpg