Annals of Business Administrative Science
Online ISSN : 1347-4456
Print ISSN : 1347-4464
ISSN-L : 1347-4456
Volume 13, Issue 5
Displaying 1-4 of 4 articles from this issue
  • A Case of Company X from 2004–2013
    Nobuo TAKAHASHI, Hirofumi OHKAWA, Nobuyuki INAMIZU
    2014 Volume 13 Issue 5 Pages 243-254
    Published: October 15, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: October 15, 2014
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    In most Japanese companies, regular employees work under a lifetime employment system and a seniority-based pay system. Under such conditions of no contingent money payments, we can accurately observe the phenomena associated with intrinsic motivation. Therefore, we conducted Survey X, an exhaustive survey for all employees of Company X carried out once a fiscal year, during the fiscal years 2004–2013. Using the total 13,019 employees' data of Survey X, we test a version of Deci's (1975) hypothesis that if a person's feeling of self-determination is enhanced, his or her job satisfaction will increase. As a result, there is a strong linear relationship between the job satisfaction ratio and the degree of self-determination. However, occupation and rank tend to determine the band of fluctuation with respect to the degree of self-determination. This indicates a strong likelihood that there is a spurious correlation between a degree of self-determination and a job satisfaction ratio.
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  • Ryusuke KOSUGE
    2014 Volume 13 Issue 5 Pages 255-269
    Published: October 15, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: October 15, 2014
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    Though lean production has its origin in the Toyota Production System (TPS), it has become popular across various industries. During this process, a striking situation has occurred in Sweden, particularly in its service industry. This paper aims to discuss the background and context of this phenomenon. In Sweden, work and management styles based on the tradition of socio-technical systems (STS), as embodied in Volvo's Uddevalla plant, used to be competing with lean production as a collection of practices observed in the Japanese automobile industry. However, once lean was viewed as a management approach that aims to create a smooth flow of value towards the customer, the integration of the two occurred. To illustrate this point, a case of a school is considered. It shows that reflection by autonomous teams of teachers play an important role in problem solving that accompanies the implementation of lean. Such an integrated style draws out workers' intrinsic motivation through involvement in problem solving, and thereby embodies the “respect for the people” philosophy in TPS. It is expected to be suitable particularly for the service context.
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  • Hidenori SATO
    2014 Volume 13 Issue 5 Pages 271-281
    Published: May 26, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: October 15, 2014
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    Organizational identity is a set of characteristics that reflect an organization's distinctiveness. The solution to the issues of organizational identity requires an individual and specific comprehension. Therefore, cross-sectional quantitative research for a pre-established category established by the researcher was difficult to perform. As a result, until now, the mainstream organizational identity studies have been qualitative rather than quantitative. However, while one aspect of organizational identity studies is to solve the question of organizational identity itself, another aspect is to solve the question of its impact on the organization. Qualitative methods may be appropriate to solve the question of organizational identity itself, but quantitative methods are better suited to solve the question regarding its organizational impact. In other words, it is possible to utilize qualitative methods to comprehend an organization's identity while using quantitative methods, for example, to measure the organizational identification of its members and conflicts that arise from the differences in directivity among its members. Research utilizing quantitative methods of this type may increase in the future.
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  • The Guardians of Denshin 8 Go
    Fumihiko IKUINE, Hideki FUJITA
    2014 Volume 13 Issue 5 Pages 283-298
    Published: October 15, 2014
    Released on J-STAGE: October 15, 2014
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    In terms of software, “continuous development” of the software is the best quality assurance. Continuous development requires either the original developer to continue development, or the next generation of developers to take over the development. It has been noted that when the original developer has used “open source,” a development paradigm in which the source code is kept open to all, highly motivated and competent developers will participate in development. This makes it easier for a project to survive. However, at the same time, when the source code is opened to a broad audience a fork in the source code tends to occur. When this happens, those with a high level of competence and motivation abandon the development and go their separate ways. In such a situation, it is difficult for a project to survive. In the case of Denshin 8 go, a guardian for the source code was appointed, and the original developer and the guardians avoided this dilemma. Richard Stallman of the GNU project and Linus Torvalds of Linux project act as legitimate guardians to avoid fork.
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