Management and culture:

The Asian way

Wendell W Solomons

When a new manager walks into an office, management norms appear music that can be fiddled anywhere. Yet, leading script-writers of tunes in the West were to discover that the violins had to play sweet harmony for bankers who had bought up the work of innovators such as Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison.

Management writer Peter F Drucker was of special interest to me. He became Professor of Management at New York University due to new demand for managers (born in Austria in 1919 he had qualified formally in international and public law). Most of his books provide valuable background literature for managers. He coined the term “knowledge worker” - which contributed later to “knowledge society”.

Yet, despite waves in management such as Drucker’s that nudged business towards “The Search for Excellence” (the title of the popular management book by Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman), Anglo-American industry went into meltdown under bankers’ holding houses as compared with Japan.

There corporations such as Mitsubishi floated their own banks to attend to their cashiering needs.

Japan, in this manner, showed us how the horse might come before the cart.

My own research drew from such observations and led me to propose management reforms in 1981. Yet, media beamed neoliberal melodies such as ‘Magic of the Marketplace.’ In consequence just one management institute (headed by Dr R L Wickremasinghe) and one newspaper published my proposal. I had to return much later in 1992 in an article now available at many sites on the Net where I discuss management essentials and Robert Reich’s work.

At web site www.chinamediaresearch.net, Dr Ming-Yi Wu usefully takes up the prism of culture for her report, “Compare Participative Leadership Theories in Three Cultures” -

“After reviewing prior leadership literature, Dorfman and House (2004) have noticed that the field of leadership study is ‘Western-dominated’. According to Yukl (2002), most of the leadership research in the past five decades was conducted in Western countries, including the United States, Canada, and Western Europe. House (1995) also noted the ‘need for a better understanding of the way in which leadership is enacted in various cultures and a need for an empirical grounded theory to explain differential leader behaviour and effectiveness across cultures’.

To bring in international perspectives on leadership communication, Japan and Taiwan have been chosen in this article as comparison of cultures due to their relevance for a broader understanding of communication phenomena in cultures which are highly divergent from the United States. According to Hofstede (2001), the United States is a highly individualistic culture.

Leadership in Taiwan

However, both Japan and Taiwan are collectivistic [Asian] cultures. Japanese management and leadership styles have received extensive attention in both the scholarly and popular management literature in the United States. For example, Ouchi (1981) proposed Theory Z based on the principles of organizational management in Japanese organizations.

Taiwan provides a cultural setting that is less familiar to U.S. scholars and that has undergone a recent change from a more authoritarian-structured society to one that is more democratic. Both of these cultures, thus, provide opportunities to compare participative leadership theories in different cultural settings.’

“Different from the American view and Japanese view of participative leadership, most literature that discusses Chinese leadership stresses the concept of authoritarian leadership. According to Bond and Hwang (1986), ‘it seems that Chinese prefer an authoritarian leadership style in which a benevolent and respected leader is not only considerate of his followers, but also able to take skilled and decisive action’. According to Redding and Wong (1986), ‘leadership style within Chinese companies is directive and authoritarian’.

“Similar to Huang (1986, 1999), Kao (1987) also proposed that Chinese organizational leaders tend to adopt a supervisor-centred, authoritarian leadership style. In family-owned organizations, organizational leaders are not elected to be leaders; they become organizational leaders because they are the owners or the owners’ relatives.’

To be continued