Japan Organizational Culture Case Study

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Organizational culture refers to the conduct of people within an organization and the significance of such conduct or behavior. According to Neuliep (2009), organizational culture is similar to a nation’s culture. A country’s culture determines the specific management and leadership approaches, as well as the organizational tactics applied in a particular organization. In order to develop a management-training programme to train North American managers in intercultural management, I have identified Japan as a country in the Asia Pacific region. As more than 95% of its residents are Japanese, it can be said that Japan is a homogeneous country. Japan’s uniformity plays a part in making it unchallenging for its people to comprehend each other with hardly any conversation. In other words, they use less verbal communication. On the other hand, America is heterogeneous and thus their people express themselves in more words than needed (Jandt, 2012). Therefore, as Japanese people tend to be less verbal in their interactions, this might conflict with the behavior of American managers who are verbose. Furthermore, Japanese people employ kinesic behavior in the form of bowing as a traditional greeting whereas…show more content…
Therefore, the Japanese would attempt to stay away from doubtfulness while the Americans are generally less concerned with avoiding uncertainty or ambiguity. Therefore, communication between the two cultures may result in the Japanese being anxious and awkward as the situation would be uncertain and unforeseeable for them (Neuliep, 2012). For example, an American employee would pose a lot of questions and inquiries to a Japanese employee in order to obtain information. This is a result of the American’s low context culture that relies heavily on verbal communication to acquire

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