抄録
As international competition increases, management of overseas affiliates of Japanese companies is an increasingly important subject matter for both practitioners and management scholars. The present paper focuses on the role played by boundary spanners in the management of overseas affiliates. Boundary spanners are defined as those individuals who bridge physical and other factors that separate a multinational corporation’s headquarters and its overseas affiliates, as well as bridge separations between overseas affiliates.We employ a case study research approach, and focus on the single case of Toyota’s affiliate in Taiwan, Kuozui Motors, Ltd. Our findings show that boundary spanners from both Japan and Taiwan worked to (1) increase the sharing of ways of thinking between Toyota’s headquarters in Japan and Kuozui, and (2) improve the Japanese language skills of employees of Kuozui. Two processes that were found to have contributed significantly to the achievement of these results. First, in the act of jointly pursuing TPS at Kuozui authority was delegated in a particular way from Japanese top managers to Taiwanese managers. Second, Kuozui managers translated numerous exceptional books related to the Toyota Production System (TPS) from Japanese and English into Chinese. As a success indicator, we focus on the high performance of manufacturing engineering at Kuozui, which has reached a notably high level within the Toyota Group.
