2014 Volume 39 Pages 92-108
The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between organizational adaptation of employees who are former foreign students at Japanese universities (hereafter “former foreign student employees”) and the support they receive from their Japanese managers supervising the first workplace they are assigned to.
The result of the questionnaire survey completed by former foreign student employees (N=102), showed that they were less aware of “support of a cultural nature” from Japanese managers compared to “support of work-related nature.” “Support of a cultural nature” is the type of support that takes into consideration cultural differences, such as “questions about the other person’s culture,” “explanation of Japanese culture,” and “handling situations of cultural conflict.”
Furthermore, support from a Japanese manager was divided into the four following types, based on the results of a cluster analysis: “average support group,” “low support (mental and cultural support low) group,” “high support group,” and “no support group”. With this grouping we explored the impact of support from Japanese managers on the employees’ organizational adaptation. The “high support group” had higher self-evaluation scores than other groups in learning about cultural socialization such as “organizational goal and values” and “human relations.” However, no difference in learning about occupational socialization, such as “becoming more capable in handling work-related tasks” was observed.
In examining the relationship between support from Japanese managers and “organizational commitment, career perspective, and job satisfaction,” the “high support group” had higher self-evaluation scores than the other groups.
The above results point to the possibility that when former foreign student employees could not obtain support from a Japanese manager, their organizational commitment and job satisfaction is low and they could not have long-term career perspectives, which lead to poor organizational adaptation, even if they can handle various work-related tasks
