Lukewarm Feeling in Company X from 2004 – 2013

: Japanese companies often criticize themselves on their own “ nurumayu [lukewarm] nature”; however, in reality, according to Takahashi (1989), the lukewarm feeling felt by organization members can be explained through the effective temperature hypothesis . An organization’s propensity to change as a system is measured as system temperature , while a member’s propensity to change as an organization person is measured as body temperature . The lukewarm feeling felt by members can then be explained using effective temperature, which is defined as the system temperature minus the body temperature. This paper validates the effective temperature hypothesis using data from Survey X, an exhaustive survey of all employees of Japanese Company X, which is successful in organizational reform. The survey was carried out once a fiscal year, during the fiscal years 2004 – 2013. Like the results of the JPC Survey of Takahashi (2013), those of Survey X show the coefficient of determination of 0.9840 with a surprisingly neat straight line, demonstrating a direct relationship wherein the lukewarm feeling ratio drops as the effective temperature rises.

with a surprisingly neat straight line, demonstrating a direct relationship wherein the lukewarm feeling ratio drops as the effective temperature rises.

Introduction
The so-called "nurumayu [lukewarm] nature" of Japanese companies often tends to be viewed as a negative organizational climate or as a classic example of "inactivated state of organizations." It is difficult to explain the "nurumayu nature" in English (Takahashi, 1992b). However, Takahashi (1989) successfully gives an explanation for it by testing the effective temperature hypothesis as a framework to explain the lukewarm feeling. The hypothesis is that effective temperature is defined as system temperature minus body temperature. Considered analogous to water temperature in a bathtub, system temperature means an organization's propensity to change 1 as a system. In the same way, body temperature indicates the degree of member's propensity to change as an organization person.

Question:
Q1. Do you feel that the atmosphere at your work place is lukewarm ("nurumayu")? 1 Propensity to change of an agent also plays an important role in a multi-agent computer simulation model by Kuwashima, Takahashi, and Tamada (2005). Kondo (1992) uses the concepts of nurumayu and propensity to change when linking Takahashi (1992a) and Kawai's (1992) theory on organizational activation to Axelrod's (1984) theory on the evolution of cooperation.
Assuming that the lukewarm feeling ratio is the proportion of people who responded "yes" to the question (Q1), the effective temperature hypothesis can be expressed as follows.

Effective Temperature Hypothesis
Define the effective temperature (T) as follows: Then the lukewarm feeling ratio of a group is in reverse proportion to its mean of the effective temperature.
The system temperature (SINDEX) and body temperature (BINDEX) here were measured as follows (Takahashi, 1997b), using the following questions.
System Temperature: S1. Have high performing individuals been consistently promoted For these ten questions, the combined score for S1-S5 measured the system temperature (SINDEX), while that for B1-B5 measured the body temperature (BINDEX). The "Japan Productivity Center (JPC) Survey" 2 gathered data over a period of 11 years (1990 to 2000) from 10,916 white-collar workers of 46 major Japanese companies involved in the JPC Academy of Management Development, with a response rate of 89.3%. Further examination of this data showed consistent accuracy of the effective temperature hypothesis (Takahashi, 2001(Takahashi, , 2013. Accordingly, this paper examines the hypothesis on the basis of an annual comprehensive survey, Survey X. We investigate the relationship between the lukewarm feeling ratio and the effective temperature. The respondents are divided into 11 groups: Effective temperature = −5, effective temperature = −4, and so on up to effective temperature = 5, and the lukewarm feeling ratio of each group is calculated. Figure 1 shows a comparison of this data with those of the JPC Survey for 10,536 workers in Takahashi (2013).

A Test for Effective Temperature Hypothesis
Like the JPC Survey, Survey X also shows a linear relationship between the increase in effective temperature and the decrease in the lukewarm feeling ratio, thus validating the effective temperature hypothesis. However, only nine of the 10,536 JPC Survey respondents (0.09%) and 12 of the 12,983 Survey X respondents

Tracing Organizational Change by Lukewarm Feelings
One possible reason why the lukewarm feeling ratio of every effective temperature group of the Survey X respondents is 10 points lower than that of the corresponding group of the JPC Survey respondents could be a major organizational reform in Company X.
The most dramatic change during the ten-year duration of Survey X As Takahashi (1997bTakahashi ( , 2003Takahashi ( , 2013 has pointed out, the lukewarm feeling ratio in the JPC Survey data tends to increase during recession. Although this trend appears to be contrary to simple common sense, it is an established fact that can also be explained by the effective temperature hypothesis. Takahashi (2013) states that, since the body temperature is quite stable with a certain degree of constancy, the way the effective temperature changes (how the effective temperature makes us feel hot or lukewarm) is very similar to the way the system temperature changes. Takahashi (2013) explains this phenomenon is "much like the phenomenon experienced when driving a car: when we step on the accelerator, our bodies feel as if they are being held back; when we step on the brake, our bodies feel as if they being pushed forward. Since the human body is trying to move in a linear motion at uniform velocity, the law of inertia pulls the body back or pushes it forward in the event of sudden acceleration or deceleration." If this explanation is correct, then the most important factor in determining the lukewarm feeling ratio is not business confidence in Japan as a whole, 3 but acceleration and braking in individual companies. In other words, the lukewarm feeling increases when individual companies step on the brakes and decreases when they step on the accelerator. This is clearly shown in Figure 2 from the Survey X data. As correct (Takahashi, 2000).

Conclusion
The data from Survey X validate the effective temperature hypothesis. Takahashi (2013)