How have Japanese companies become world leaders in the automotive and electronics industries, among others? What is the secret of their success? Two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi, are the first to tie the success of Japanese companies to their ability to create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. In The Knowledge-Creating Company, Nonaka and Takeuchi provide an inside look at how Japanese companies go about creating this new knowledge organizationally. The authors point out that there are two types of knowledge: explicit knowledge, contained in manuals and procedures, and tacit knowledge, learned only by experience, and communicated only indirectly, through metaphor and analogy. U.S. managers focus on explicit knowledge. The Japanese, on the other hand, focus on tacit knowledge. And this, the authors argue, is the key to their success--the Japanese have learned how to transform tacit into explicit knowledge. To explain how this is done--and illuminate Japanese business practices as they do so--the authors range from Greek philosophy to Zen Buddhism, from classical economists to modern management gurus, illustrating the theory of organizational knowledge creation with case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, Nissan, 3M, GE, and even the U.S. Marines. For instance, using Matsushita's development of the Home Bakery (the world's first fully automated bread-baking machine for home use), they show how tacit knowledge can be converted to explicit knowledge: when the designers couldn't perfect the dough kneading mechanism, a software programmer apprenticed herself withthe master baker at Osaka International Hotel, gained a tacit understanding of kneading, and then conveyed this information to the engineers. In addition, the authors show that, to create knowledge, the best management style is neither top-down nor bottom-up, but rather what they call "middle-up-down," in which the middle managers form a bridge between the ideals of top management and the chaotic realities of the frontline. As we make the turn into the 21st century, a new society is emerging. Peter Drucker calls it the "knowledge society," one that is drastically different from the "industrial society," and one in which acquiring and applying knowledge will become key competitive factors. Nonaka and Takeuchi go a step further, arguing that creating knowledge will become the key to sustaining a competitive advantage in the future. Because the competitive environment and customer preferences changes constantly, knowledge perishes quickly. With The Knowledge-Creating Company, managers have at their fingertips years of insight from Japanese firms that reveal how to create knowledge continuously, and how to exploit it to make successful new products, services, and systems.

The knowledge-creating company

Individualism and collectivism

Abstract : A study is reported of the variations in organizational commitment and job satisfaction, as related to subsequent turnover in a sample of recently-employed psychiatric technician trainees. A longitudinal study was made across a 10 1/2 month period, with attitude measures collected at four points in time. For this sample, job satisfaction measures appeared better able to differentiate future stayers from leavers in the earliest phase of the study. With the passage of time, organizational commitment measures proved to be a better predictor of turnover, and job satisfaction failed to predict turnover. The findings are discussed in the light of other related studies, and possible explanations are examined. (Modified author abstract)

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Organizational Commitment, Job Satisfaction and Turnover Among Psychiatric Technicians. Technical Report No. 16.

Discusses the problem of creativity and examines situations in the universe where it exists.

The Nature of Creativity

Antecedents and consequences of job satisfaction in the hotel industry

Summary
Prior literature examining the antecedents of employee affect has largely ignored subtle affective influences in the workplace and their impact on employees' affective experiences and behaviors. A substantial body of evidence from basic psychology research suggests that individuals' affect can be influenced by minimal stimulus input. The primary objective of this research is to take an initial step towards understanding the “real-world” impact of subtle affective stimuli in the workplace. Specifically, in a field experiment with a within-subjects design, we collected data from 68 sales representatives and examined the effect of a subtle affective stimulus (i.e., a black-and-white picture of a woman smiling printed on the backdrop of paper–pencil surveys) on employees' affect, well-being, and performance. Results showed that the smiling picture significantly enhanced participants' positive affect, which in turn influenced employees' extra-role performance and emotional exhaustion. The smiling picture also indirectly influenced employees' in-role performance and emotional exhaustion via negative affect. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed at the end of the paper. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Picture this: A field experiment of the influence of subtle affective stimuli on employee well-being and performance

Much has been speculated regarding the influence of cultural norms on the acceptance and use of personnel selection testing. This study examined the cross-level direct effects of four societal cultural variables (performance orientation, future orientation, uncertainty avoidance and tightness-looseness) on selection practices of organizations in 23 countries. 1,153 HR professionals responded to a survey regarding testing practices in hiring contexts. Overall, little evidence of a connection between cultural practices and selection practices emerged. Implications of these findings for personnel selection and cross-cultural research as well as directions for future work in this area are described.

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Culture and Testing Practices: Is the World Flat?

Intrigued by relationship between team motivational context and individual characteristics in the organizational reality, we developed and tested a cross-level model to investigate the interactive effects of team empowerment and individual goal orientations on individual creative performance through the mediating mechanism of an individual’s creative self-efficacy. Using multi-wave multi-source data from 63 R&D teams in three IT companies, we found that (1) team empowerment, individual learning goal orientation, and individual performance orientation are all positively related to individual creative performance through mediation of creative self-efficacy; (2) learning orientation and performance approach orientation could both supplement the effects of team empowerment on individual creative self-efficacy. Our findings point to the importance of individual goal orientation in shaping the effects of team motivation climates and provide insights for both scholars and practitioners. The specific practical implications include but are not limited to (1) individuals with learning and performance approach orientations should be identified during hiring procedures given that they could still thrive in less empowered teams and maintain a relatively high level of creative self-efficacy and creative outcomes; (2) managers should consider assigning employees who are more learning oriented to more empowering and openended tasks in order to obtain better creative results.

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Xiang Yao

Papers

Picture this: A field experiment of the influence of subtle affective stimuli on employee well-being and performance

Culture and Testing Practices: Is the World Flat?

Individual Goal Orientations, Team Empowerment, and Employee Creative Performance: A Case of Cross‐level Interactions

Improving workplace safety by thinking about what might have been: A first look at the role of counterfactual thinking

Big five personality traits as predictors of employee creativity in probation and formal employment periods