Japanese Human Resource Management: Moving towards US-Style Practices?

The presentation will deal with two recurring and very central debates in the international management literature in general and in the literature on Japanese management in particular: the convergence vs. divergence debate and the standardization vs. localization debate. Data from a large-scale comparative survey of multinationals headquartered in the Japan, the US and Germany as well as subsidiaries of multinationals from these three countries in the two other respective countries will be presented. It will be demonstrated that Japanese, but also German subsidiaries abroad increasingly adopt US-style HR management practice. While this phenomenon might be explained for Japanese and German subsidiaries in the US with a localization effect, the data indicate that adoption of more US-style management practices even take place in Japanese subsidiaries in Germany and German subsidiaries in Japan – a surprising result which will be described as dominance effect.

Short CV: Markus Pudelko is a Reader in International Business at the University of Edinburgh Management School. He published previously on Japanese management practices in journals such as Human Resource Management, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Human Resource Management Journal, Organizational Dynamics and Asian Business and Management. In 2005 he co-edited a book entitled Japanese Management: The Search for a New Balance between Continuity and Change with Palgrave.