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Builds a profile of values for a sample of Japanese managers and their immediate supervisors, to be used by Western managers engaged in business ventures with Japanese counterparts. An exploratory factor analysis utilizes Maccoby’s head and heart traits to reveal the powerful influence of tradition in the form of Confucianism, Amayakasu, Chun‐Tzu, honesty and mental autarky, with secondary factors of professionalism and inflexibility suggesting convergence with Western beliefs. Although supervisory perceptions conformed closely with those of respondents, cross‐cultural comparisons demonstrated that US and Japanese managers espouse diametrically opposing values.

Acculturation profiles based on the self‐oriented, others‐oriented, and perceptual dimensions of acculturative adjustment were derived for MNC employees of American, Canadian, Indian, Japanese, Latin American, Carribean and Nigerian origin. Our finding of significant, target‐specific, intercultural differences is of paramount importance in delineating areas of predeparture expatriate training and development.

Builds on prior research into the impact of automation on job characteristics, which found that co‐ordination, job autonomy, and work pace were reinforced by automation, while new skill requirements, job security and exertion remained unaffected. Job satisfaction correlates reveal the existence of elements both reinforced by automation and unrelated to job satisfaction. Such elements represent sources of operator indifference to the benefits of automation or satisfaction gaps, and they include interdepartmental task co‐ordination, discretion in making production decisions, confidence to complete tasks without supervision, the achievement of career goals, perceptual skills, security of records, and longer work hours in the post‐automation period.