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This study investigates the relationship between telework frequency and knowledge management (KM) activity in Japan and the USA. By examining how telework impacts KM activity differently across these two countries, this study aims to provide insights into the design and implementation of effective telework policies tailored to specific cultural contexts.

Linear and quadratic regression analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between telework frequency and KM activity. Data was collected from samples in Japan and the USA, with respondents categorized based on prior telework experience. Various KM activities such as knowledge acquisition, sharing and application were measured using established scales.

In Japan, an inverted U-shaped relationship between telework frequency and KM activity was observed, with optimal activity occurring at four days of telework per week. Conversely, the USA demonstrated a linear relationship, indicating sustained KM activity across different telework frequencies. Notably, individuals with prior telework experience showed higher levels of KM activity compared to those without experience.

This study contributes to the understanding of how cultural differences influence the relationship between telework and KM activity, and ultimately learning. By highlighting the nuanced patterns observed in Japan and the USA, it emphasizes the importance of tailored telework policies and support mechanisms for effective KM in diverse cultural contexts. Future research could further explore additional explanatory variables and their impact on telework-related outcomes.

This exploratory paper aims to examine attitudes and practices with regard to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the effects of mandatory teleworking from home in the wake of the first state of emergency orders in Japan in 2020.

An online survey of married employees retrospectively assessed changes in work style, subjective well-being, work–family conflict and job performance before and during forced teleworking from home in Tokyo and three of the surrounding prefectures.

Regular employees reported high levels of anxiety and to have thoroughly implemented government-recommended hygiene and safety practices. A majority of respondents were satisfied with mandatory telework from home and desired to continue partial telework after the end of the pandemic. The strongest predictor of satisfaction with mandatory telework from home turned out to be adequate workspace at home for both men and women. However, the antecedents of the desire to continue working from home differed by gender.

These findings can help individuals, firms and governments better understand the effects of mandatory teleworking from home and devise countermeasures to maximize employee well-being and job performance. This is all the more crucial, as Japan has had successive waves of the virus and has declared numerous states of emergency since the beginning of the pandemic, forcing office workers to continue social distancing and remote working for the time being.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is one of the first to provide insights on how imposed teleworking from home in the context of COVID-19 in Japan affected regular employees’ personal and professional lives and to identify predictors of satisfaction with teleworking and the desire to continue doing so.

Past research has convincingly shown that higher employee subjective well-being, or happiness, is a source of higher job performance and retention. This paper therefore examines the relationships between organizational virtuousness, subjective well-being, and individual job performance among French and Japanese employees.

A questionnaire survey was conducted among Japanese and French managers and staff at Japanese and French domestic companies and structural equation modeling was employed to compare those associations.

We found that the Japanese and the French have different conceptualizations of organizational virtuousness, suggesting that firms must tailor their virtue-building activities based on the local culture. Subjective well-being is comparatively more important in Japan since it acts in complement to organizational virtuousness to positively affect job performance, while in France, only organizational virtuousness counts as a source of job performance.

National culture is revealed to be a new factor explaining differences in how employees consider organizational virtuousness and we provide evidence of positive associations of organizational virtuousness with positive subjective well-being and with job performance for both the Japanese and the French.

Organizational virtuousness cannot be construed from a universalistic perspective where virtues are conceptualized on the same basis regardless of location or region, and firms should also consider their employees' individualist or collectivist inclination when trying to influence work outcomes.

These findings point to the role of national culture on the perception of organizational virtuousness and its effect on subjective well-being and job performance.

This paper aims to examine the effect of subjective well-being, often referred to as happiness, on the relationship between organizational virtuousness and job performance among Japanese employees. The concept of happiness has been receiving more attention over the past decade as research suggests that it may be a source of greater performance.

This research uses a questionnaire survey and conditional process analysis among Japanese managers and front-line workers within Japanese firms in Japan.

This paper found that positive subjective well-being partially mediates the relationship between general organizational virtuousness and self-management-related job performance, while it acts as a moderator in the relationship between general organizational virtuousness and leadership-related job performance.

These findings indicate that in the Japanese context, the firm’s investment in organizational virtuousness will increase one part of job performance, but that investment may not be sufficient in itself to positively affect leadership competency, unless it also pays attention to its employees’ positive subjective well-being.

Based on this growing realization of the importance of subjective well-being, or happiness, and the lack of academic research in Japan on its impact on organization, this paper investigates its effect on employees’ ability to manage their own tasks and lead others.

Whereas the USA is still the largest investment destination for Japanese companies, Japan also accounts as the second largest source of investment in the country. The purpose of this paper is to, empirically, examine the detailed motives of Japanese affiliates when investing in the Southeastern USA, adding to previous research at the national level.

This paper uses a qualitative approach based on the interviews of long-term Japanese investors in the manufacturing and wholesale trade industries in the Southeastern USA and applies text analysis to identify their motives.

The results show that Japanese firms engage in market- and efficiency-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI), and still apply a classic sequence of gradual and incremental market commitments. Market size and growth rate, reducing transaction or transportation costs, and integration within local value chains are the most important to them, whereas competition, creating an export base, lowering tax and accessing skilled labor are of little concern.

The goal of Japanese FDI in the USA is no longer to bypass tariffs but is still part of a complex industrial network of relations which drives further investment. This result can inform policy makers at the state level about the factors that can drive additional foreign investment, such as the establishment of industrial clusters.

This study offers current insights into the motives of Japanese FDI in two industries.

This paper aims to examine how students can learn how to work in multi-cultural global virtual teams in a classroom-based setting using experiential learning. The students from two graduate programs in France and Japan were given relevant reading materials, individual and joint team assignments on virtual team work and were asked to evaluate their work using previously identified global virtual team key success factors.

Text-mining and co-word analyses of students’ assignments, and correlations of keyword frequencies with student culture scores provide insights on how students first experience this novel setting, raising their awareness and providing them skills for future application in an organizational setting.

The process experienced by virtual student teams has many similarities with the team formation stage in virtual teams in organizational settings. Such experiential learning is useful for global virtual team education, as students will have already experienced and solved typical challenges in a safer non-work-related setting.

This study is based on a small sample of respondents and therefore presents inherent limitations in terms of significance and generalizability.

The rise of information and communication technologies has facilitated the creation of new approaches for coordinating work and, subsequently, for new collaborative organizational forms. Little research has been conducted to address education or training for these new and essential forms of collaboration.

Subjective well-being has attracted attention in relation to its impact on job satisfaction and performance. As a result, companies would do well to encourage positive emotions and minimize negative ones in the workplace. This study aims to examine the factors that contribute to emotional contagion in the workplace in Japan.

The study builds upon previous research on emotional contagion by considering both personal and professional events using vignette questions and multiple regression analysis. A large group of permanent Japanese employees is included in the study.

Emotional contagion in the Japanese workplace was found to be primarily influenced by the level of familiarity between sender and receiver, and to a lesser extent by the receiver’s emotional susceptibility, group climate and the hierarchical difference between sender and receiver. Contrary to past research in other countries, several hypothesized predictors had little or no effect on emotional contagion among Japanese employees, such as communication frequency or empathy.

Given the persistent labor shortage and aging population, it is crucial for Japanese companies to understand how positive and negative emotions are transmitted in the workplace. This knowledge can assist them in establishing a work environment that can optimize employee well-being, performance and retention.

While the antecedents of emotional contagion have been extensively studied, their effects within Japanese corporations remain underexplored. Thus, this research investigates the factors that can foster the contagion of positive emotions while mitigating the transmission of negative emotions within the Japanese workplace, thereby addressing the prevailing challenges faced by Japanese companies.

We empirically assessed the antecedents of subjective well-being at work for French permanent employees.

The methodology includes qualitative and quantitative data analyses. In the first phase, interviews elicited the antecedents of subjective well-being at work among permanent French employees. In the second phase, a questionnaire survey was used to confirm the relevance of the antecedents uncovered in the first phase.

We found 14 distinct elements that influence French employees’ subjective well-being at work: corporate culture, job dissonance, relationships with colleagues, achievement, professional development, relationships with superiors, status, workload, perks, feedback, workspace, diversity and pay. Moreover, we identified discrete antecedents for the three components of subjective well-being at work: work achievement and relationships with superiors and colleagues for positive emotions at work, job dissonance and workload for negative emotions at work and organizational culture and professional development for satisfaction with one’s work.

The original contribution of this study is to have unpacked the black box of the antecedents of subjective well-being in the French workplace and to have uncovered discriminant predictors for each of the three components of subjective well-being at work. Furthermore, we specifically linked each of these three components with their most significant antecedents.

As Japan has been slowly opening up to foreign workers to supplement its shrinking workforce, local employees have had to deal with increased diversity at work, owing to the presence of foreign coworkers. This paper aims to investigate the relationship between foreign coworkers’ nationality (specifically Chinese, Korean and those from Western countries) and the perception of the benefits and threats of cultural diversity in the workplace by Japanese employees.

A sample of Japanese employees working in Japan, half of which working with foreigners, was used, focusing on those Japanese employees who reported working with foreign coworkers of a single nationality.

The authors found that Japanese workers’ perceived benefits of cultural diversity at work, but not perceived threats, are significantly impacted by the unique nationality of their foreign coworkers. Specifically, the effect of coworker nationality is most apparent for the two benefits of “understanding of diverse groups in society” and “social environment,” whereby cultural distance is significantly and positively related to these perceived benefits. And more benefits from cultural diversity at work are perceived by Japanese employees in the presence of Western or Chinese, rather than South Korean coworkers.

In the Japanese context, hiring employees from certain distant and heterogeneous cultures and nationalities could increase the positive perception of multiculturalism at work, therefore facilitating diversity management and fostering inclusion in the culture of the firm.

Very little research in Japan has examined perception biases among native employees based on the nationality of their foreign coworkers, which is critical as globally minded Japanese firms are trying to increase their level of internal internationalization.

The purpose of this paper is to confirm quantitatively the previous finding that organizational characteristics influence knowledge management, and to assess whether the national culture of knowledge workers equally affects the management of knowledge.

Based on data gathered from a questionnaire survey of a Japanese pharmaceutical company's 14 foreign subsidiaries, the effects of organizational characteristics and national culture on knowledge management were tested using multiple regression analysis.

Although organizational characteristics and national culture were found to affect knowledge management, the data showed organizational characteristics to be a stronger prescriptive factor compared with national culture.

Because this research centered on a single company in the pharmaceutical industry, future research should attempt to confirm the validity of this framework in other industries.

Changes in organizational characteristics, such as structure and relationship in particular, rather than adjustments in the composition of employees' nationalities, will have a stronger impact on the resulting knowledge management.

This framework linking organizational characteristics and national culture to knowledge management had received a first justification using a case study approach with a qualitative comparative method and has now been confirmed with a quantitative approach. Among the predictors of knowledge management beyond the realm of deliberate measures within the firm, the data show that organizational characteristics exert a stronger influence than national culture.