Search results

As employees in the lower ranks of a Japanese company advance through the levels of management and seniority their role in day-to-day kaizen activities shifts from that of directly improving their own job, operations and surroundings to guiding, educating and facilitating understanding and practice. The emphasis of kaizen to the employee during career progression changes in an embedded, sequential and predictable manner. To a new employee, kaizen is a process to be implemented, something that is visible and largely provided through company training and job manuals, while not necessarily being fully understood. To the senior manager, however, one who has advanced up the corporate ladder, kaizen is tacit knowledge and accumulated experiences, and is seen as being more than just reducing costs, increasing productivity and decreasing lead times. At this point, kaizen becomes something invisible, something that can produce real influence on both the company’s profitability and the manager’s reputation. Consequently, what kaizen is actually changes from being a duty associated with employment to a matter of personal, group, collective, and organizational responsibility. The purpose of this paper is to explore the mechanism underpinning the transfer of kaizen (acknowledgement and exercise) in the Japanese workplace that results in it being sustained across multiple.

Data were collected from research participants (n = 53) through a mixed-method multi-language field design comprising questionnaires and unstructured interviews conducted in genba, the workplaces of five domain-name multinational companies in Japan. Multi-level statistical analysis identified two largely mutually exclusive generational groups.

During their late 40s, employees were found to transfer their understanding of kaizen between the two forms. At this age, employees were identified to shift from being student to teacher; follower to leader; and disciple to sensei. This study identified how kaizen shifts from one generation to another; when kaizen shifts through the change in responsibility of employees; and changes in the understanding and practice that creates sustained business excellence.

Importantly, the study reveals how kaizen itself is a sustainable business activity in the workplace, one that Western business is struggling to emulate.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a definitive and insightful working definition of kaizen for practitioners and academics in the West through which they may better understand the kaizen phenomenon and its intangible but critical underpinning philosophy.

A phenomenological study of the utility of kaizen within in the bounds of active kaizen environments in name Japanese industrial organisations was conducted over a three-year period in Japan. The research explored how Japanese workers acknowledge, exercise, identify and diffuse kaizen in a sustainable manner.

Kaizen is found to be a broad philosophical approach to work that serves different purposes for different members of the organisation, where no universal definition appears to exist yet differing ideologies are tolerated. Kaizen in Japan has a considerably deep meaning: it channels worker creativity and expressions of individuality into bounded environments, and creates an energy that drives a shared state of mind among employees to achieve proactive changes and innovation in the workplace.

This paper competently bridges the Japanese-Anglosphere cultural divide in social and business contexts. It contributes to the development of practitioner understanding of the utility of kaizen in Japan through unhindered cross-cultural research methodology, enabled by researcher competency and fluency in Japanese language and culture.

Much literature suggests a positive relationship between winning a quality award and subsequent firm performance. However, for the vast majority of the large Japanese manufacturing firms that have won the Deming Prize results in this study indicate a negative association. Results also show that for a minority of these firms there does appear to be a positive relationship between winning and subsequent performance. Two theories, the danger of simplicity and the winner’s curse, are utilized to explain these results. Firms that compete for quality awards have a significant risk of putting undue pressure on organizational resources or focusing too narrowly on winning and neglecting other aspects of their business, thereby leading to performance shortfalls. Significant experience in TQM/TQC prior to competing for a quality award may moderate these risks. For managers, there should be serious consideration as to whether their companies should compete for a quality award in the hope of improving performance. Instead, they may want to ask if there are any alternative methods for designing and implementing improvements in quality control.

The purpose of this paper is to focus on investor reactions to unanticipated changes in income, and whether those reactions can be mitigated by managerial discussion. The authors investigate how top-management team certainty and optimism during post-earnings announcement conference calls can serve as corrective actions and add back firm value in times of unexpected changes in firm-specific risk.

The research question is tested empirically in the context of large, publicly traded, US firms’ quarterly earnings announcements, and their subsequent post-earnings announcement conference calls. The authors use the advanced content analysis software DICTION to measure the levels of managerial certainty and optimism displayed during post-earnings announcement conference calls, and event-study methodology to measure investors’ reactions.

Results indicate that earnings surprises are negatively associated with firm value, but that this relationship is mitigated positively by displays of managerial certainty and optimism during post-earnings announcement conference calls.

This work uses an innovative research design to study top-management team rhetoric in post-earnings announcement conference calls, and how specific discussions mitigate investors’ negative reactions to increases in firm-specific risk. The study highlights the importance of top-management team certainty and optimism for value creation in times of change in firm-specific risk, and the importance of rhetoric as a tool for corrective action.

This study aims to critically evaluate the factual triple bottom line (TBL) sustainability performance of commercial foodservices as featured in peer-reviewed academic publications.

The commercial foodservices’ sustainability performance-related articles were collected for a systematic review. An inductive thematic analysis was applied to the eligible articles.

The contribution of the commercial foodservice sector to the TBL sustainability is highlighted through eight themes: food waste management; food safety and hygiene; food allergy management; provision of healthy meals; local food use; employment of the disadvantaged; well-being of (non)managerial personnel; and noise level management.

The critical evaluation of the actual TBL sustainability measures adopted by commercial foodservice providers highlights the feasibility of the measures, thus calling for their broader industry uptake. Research gaps and issues for future investigations are accentuated for scholars to support the industry in its progress towards the goals of the TBL sustainability.

This research focuses on the relationship between Top Management Team heterogeneity (TMT) and University Spin-Offs (USOs) economic performance according to a micro-foundational perspective. The purpose consists in exploring whether a high academic representation in TMTs may improve USOs’ performance and how their competencies and backgrounds affect USOs’ economic success.

The authors employed data from the Italian platform Netval to identify the entire population of USOs in southern Italy. They selected both pure and hybrid spin-offs that had at least one academic member on the TMT. Applying these conditions to our sample selection, the authors came to a population of 136 firms. They applied a hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses.

Our main findings reveal that the USOs’ economic performance improves with more academicians in the TMT and even in the same scientific field. Our data also shows that CEO duality has a negative impact on economic performance.

This work takes for the first time a micro-foundational perspective to analyze individual-level factors that affect USOs’ performance. The authors tried to bridge a research gap in the USO literature, shedding light on the relationship between TMT composition and new venture performance, considering some significant interactions between team members. Our expected findings also contribute to the general literature on entrepreneurial teams in new ventures and suggest a means to reconcile some inconsistent literature results on TMT heterogeneity and USO performance.

This paper seeks to concern itself with the determination of the effect that external factors have on the design and implementation of management accounting systems in a developing economy which has in the last decade experienced fluctuating levels of environmental uncertainty.

This is explained through the use of a case study involving interviews and archival data in a company over a ten‐year period, a period involving considerable environmental change. It explores, how the organisation responded to the changes experienced over that time and the extent to which this impacted management accounting.

The study finds that the management accounting and control systems used are more mechanistic in times of environmental and political stability, but become more organic in periods of greater uncertainty.

The challenge of relying for this research on respondents' recall of events occurring some years previously is acknowledged and steps taken to minimise this are identified. The results of any case study research are not widely generalisable beyond the context in which it is studied.

This study offers insights into management accounting and control systems as they are implemented in an underdeveloped country where uncertainty stems from political fluctuations.

This research sees environmental uncertainty stemming from changes in the political structure and this precipitates changes in markets and their structures. Companies operating in those markets are influenced by and need to react to such changes.