Building long-term competitive advantage as seen in the management of Japanese subsidiaries by excellent American companies: Instilling a hybrid US-Japan organizational culture

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to examine the organizational culture possessed by Japanese subsidiary funded by a U.S. firm. Japanese subsidiaries are considered to have a system of strategy formation that addresses the gap with the region where the parent company is located and also creates competitive advantage. This system is then influenced by the organizational culture of the parent company and the local market culture. In this paper, I examined the conditions that create competitive long-term advantage by analyzing the case of Johnson & Johnson's business expansion into the Japanese market by organizing and analyzing a publicly available secondary data. As a result, this paper presented two hypotheses that " Excellent U.S. company's Japanese subsidiary can produce decisive top management and proactive generalists by adopting Japanese-style organizational management ". and " Excellent U.S. company's Japanese subsidiary can create an organizational culture that is a source of long-term advantage by adopting Japanese-style organizational management ". The contribution of this paper is that it finds that "the organizational culture developed in the Japanese subsidiaries of U.S. firms is a source of long-term competitive advantage" and makes recommendations that complement existing theories of organizational culture and multinational enterprises.