Why are there few promotion opportunities for Japanese companies and it is difficult for them to enter the management?

This is a common understanding in China. Working in a Japanese company is quite normal, without any challenge and stability, but there are few promotion opportunities, so it is difficult to enter the management like European and American companies.

China people working in Japan will encounter the same problem.

First of all, we need to introduce two customary systems in Japan.

1, lifetime employment system

This system is easy to understand, that is, to hire an employee until retirement. In Japan, there is also a name called "long-term work habit", which was initially influenced by Confucian loyalty, but there are other reasons, which will be discussed later.

2, the annual work sequence system

This is the general impression of China people on Japanese enterprises, which is the common practice of Japanese enterprises in personnel system. Simply put, employees' salaries and positions are set according to their length of service and age. Personal ability and performance have little influence on salary and position. Simply put, your age and length of service basically determine your salary and position.

These two systems complement each other. It can be said that the lifelong employment system is the basis of the annual merit sequence system, which makes the lifelong employment system more stable. Therefore, there are few frequent job-hopping in Japan (which has changed in recent years), and there are few young people in the management of the company (except the rich second generation who rely on inheritance).

The implementation of this system has also led to the lack of adventure and innovation spirit of Japanese enterprises (as long as they are stable, they can continue to be promoted, and good performance will not help, so as long as they do not make big mistakes, Japanese employees and management are generally unwilling to take risks)

One of the reasons for the formation of these two systems is Japan's inherent culture. Japanese Confucian culture is slightly different from that of China. Japanese pay attention to loyalty, while China pays attention to benevolence and filial piety. This is a cultural background. So most Japanese companies advocate "destroying private interests and serving the public? Love the spirit of society "(note that in Japanese, a society is a club or a company).

Moreover, in Japanese corporate culture, "result orientation" is generally emphasized, that is, performance and employees are evaluated according to the final results, while the process and motivation are ignored, that is, even if the starting point is good, things will still get a low evaluation if they are screwed up. This idea has further deepened the culture that Japanese enterprises pay attention to stability and are unwilling to make progress.

Second, it has a lot to do with Japan's economic development after the war.

Note: The figure shows the per capita GDP statistics ァメリカ =ィギリス =ニクソョッッ =

1After the 1950s, Japan's economy developed rapidly, and enterprises needed a stable number of employees, and maintained the stability of employees during the period of high development. And because of the healthy development of enterprises, it is necessary to limit the number of employees and avoid disorderly expansion. Therefore, this system is very stable in Japanese enterprises.

However, in the late 1990s, after Japan's economic downturn, due to this system, the company was unable to re-select and eliminate talents, which led to the redundancy of the company's personnel and huge financial expenses (Japanese employees left their jobs, and the company needed to pay a sum of money according to the length of service, and the old employees could get a lot of subsidies). Due to the economic recession, the company can't survive in the increasingly fierce enterprise competition by perfect policies. It needs to encourage innovation and take risks to make the company stand out, so this system has become the shackles of Japanese enterprises.

Moreover, it is generally the elderly who occupy high salaries and positions in the company. Old people's working ability and willingness are generally lower than those of young people, but enterprises have to pay more wages for the elderly, so they are unwilling to continue to pay such a heavy burden. So the system began to crash.

In today's Japan, seniority system and lifelong employment system are still the mainstream, but they are not so solid.

Japanese companies and Japanese overseas companies are reluctant to let foreigners enter the management of the company.

Japanese domestic enterprises are easy to understand, because of poor communication, Japanese culture, like other East Asian cultures, is relatively conservative. As mentioned above, the Japanese attach great importance to loyalty, and foreigners rarely work in Japan all their lives, so Japanese companies rarely give foreign citizens good promotion opportunities.

However, Japanese overseas enterprises rarely let foreigners into the management, which needs to be explained in detail.

In Japanese, there are two vivid words for overseas enterprises. The overseas branches of Japanese companies are called "local legal persons" (literally local legal persons), while the changes made by local legal persons according to local customs and regulations are called "localization". This paper mainly discusses the localization problem.

Japan's localization of overseas enterprises is not very good, or the progress is very slow, which means that overseas Japanese enterprises are still following the Japanese set of things.

Japanese account for 78.9% of the senior managers of Japanese overseas enterprises, far exceeding 50% of European enterprises and 30% of North American enterprises? (Source: Research on the policy of independent administrative legal person? Training institutions "the fourth time, the achievements of Japanese companies, talents, talents"), which makes it difficult for citizens of countries where overseas companies are located to stay in Japan.

The picture below can explain why.

Note: From left to right (top-down) translated as 1, the head office lags behind in internationalization 2, recruiting Japanese talents 3, not hiring local talents 4, not cultivating local talents 5, Japanese permanent staff occupying major positions 6, talents leaving 7, local talents feeling the glass ceiling) 8, the influence of corporate recruitment brands decreases 9, and the investment in education is hesitant.

The above picture can clearly reflect the present situation of Japanese overseas enterprises. Because of the poor internationalization of the head office, overseas activities tend to be conservative, which in turn affects the employment of overseas branches. However, overseas branches are afraid of personnel turnover and send Japanese employees directly from Japan instead of overseas employees.

In other words, the previous two systems directly affected the overseas operation of Japanese enterprises.

The picture below shows the personnel center of Japanese overseas enterprises.

Note: from top to bottom, 1, local staff training (management) 2, local staff employment above management level 3, all Chinese characters are not explained 4, local staff maintenance 5, local staff training (general level) 6, white-collar local staff employment 7, blue-collar local staff employment.

In other words, the training and maintenance of local employees by Japanese overseas enterprises are quite poor, which leads to a high turnover rate when local employees feel the bottleneck of promotion. Japanese overseas enterprises are very backward or do not pay attention to the international training of local employees. In contrast, the following picture shows the international training of Japanese employees by Japanese companies in Japan.

Note: From top to bottom, 65,438+0, Japanese foreign language education 2, Japanese international business skills education 3, Japanese overseas job seeker selection and training (backbone, management) 4, Japanese overseas job seeker selection and training (young people) 5, international potential leader selection and training 6, international outstanding talent management 7, in. The business philosophy of international * * * has penetrated into the value of 9%. A workplace system of 10 has been built for foreigners working in Japan, and a personnel system of 1 1 has been designed for international * * Connect, achieving the most suitable talent allocation in the world. The Japanese head office directly recruits 13 foreign graduates overseas to enhance their work in Japan.

Comparing the above picture with the above picture, we can clearly see the strategies of Japanese enterprises in Japan and abroad. Japan's strategy mainly has the following two points.

1, focusing on cultivating Japanese employees' internationalization ability and international management ability.

2. For overseas employees, the recruitment focuses on technical posts and business posts, ignoring the management ability training of foreigners.

The strategy of overseas in-situ legal person is as follows

1, the management tends to send Japanese employees directly from Japan for management.

2. Non-management positions are mainly for local employees.

3. Cultivate management ability for local employees, but it is far inferior to Japanese employees in Japan.

4. Don't directly recruit local employees into the management.

5. Overseas employees are highly mobile.

From the above analysis, due to the influence of the above two customary systems, Japanese enterprises aim at long-term employment both in Japan and overseas, and basically do not consider bringing high-mobility overseas local employees into the management. Instead, it tends to be cultivated directly in Japan and then sent overseas. This is one of the biggest differences with foreign companies in Europe and America.

In the final analysis, it is the different cultures of national enterprises that lead Japanese enterprises to pay attention to personnel stability and self-cultivation in their development, and their ability to resist the flow of personnel is poor.

However, with the internationalization of Japanese enterprises, the declining birthrate has become more and more serious, and the annual service sequence and lifelong employment system have collapsed. This situation may improve in the future. Let Japanese enterprises pay more attention to local customs and abilities and change the concept of loyalty to enterprises in Japanese corporate culture.