Abstract
Job-Hopping has been one of the most persistent problems for Japanese companies doing business in Taiwan. Job-hopping makes local workers’ skill training harder. So, most of Japanese companies, especially in service industry, have abandoned their own job training and asked local partner companies to deal with human resource matters. As a result, the service standard of Japanese companies in Taiwan has been “adjusted” to local level gradually, that is, unintended localization of service. However, recently, as Taiwanese service market has saturated and many Taiwanese people travel to Japan and have experienced local Japanese service, they also expect Japanese companies in Taiwan to offer same standard of service as in Japan. But it is almost impossible to offer same standard service as in Japan using local workers without special training. Consequently, Japanese companies must consider developing local workers ’skill by themselves without compromise.
Preceding studies pointed that Japanese companies showed narrower “space of developing career” to local workers than Western companies, so it was the reason why, job-hopping was more frequent in Japanese companies comparing to Western companies. Therefore, this study hypothesizes that “wider space of developing career” would work effectively for retention of local workers. So, this study made an interview to one of Japanese restaurant companies which succeeded in retention management, and found that one of key factors for good retention in the company was the establishment of “area manager position, which is a manager of several restaurants”. In other words, “expansion of space of developing career” worked effectively for retention. It also found that “expansion of space of developing career” worked for good retention in Taiwanese hotel company. Consequently, this study finds that wider “space of developing career” works for better retention for employees, it also works for Japanese service companies in Taiwan.
