One of the important components of China's economic reform started in 1979 is to introduce foreign captial and to establish Chinese-foreign joint venture corporations (JVCs). Generally speaking, managers seem to enjoy more power to manage their business in JVCs than those in Chinese state-owned corporations (SOCs). Past research shows that organizations need to maintain practices which are consistent with the overall business strategy in order to remain competitive in the global market (Caligiuri and Stroh, 1995). This is particularly true for managerial human resources. Ishida (1996) reported that many Japanese globalizing corporations do not put the first priority on profit, but on strengthening network systems and HRM systems to cope with the international competition and technological changes. Contrary to these global business practices, Chinese managers are doing their job mainly within the changing domestic rather than global business environment, although they are quite aware of the strategic importance of linking the long-term plan with the changing global business environment (Chen, 1996; Chen and Wakabayashi, 1997). What is particularly important for Chinese managers in JVCs and SOCs in this connection is to acquire needed knowledge and skills to cope with the changing environment. For the purpose of identifying what kinds of managerial skills and abilities are required to achieve effective managerial performance, the present study was designed to isolate ten critical managerial skills for managers in SOCs and in Japanese JVCs in China. The results suggest there exist basically no significant difference in the critical managerial skills required between the two groups of managers. Discussions were made on opportunities to use managerial skills on the job and the career progress environment as determinates of skill utilization and learning.

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The purpose of this article is to discuss about the mentoring concept and its effect in business organizations through an extensive review of literature. Firstly, the concept of mentoring is scrutinized from the view point of personal trait, roles, and behavioral dimensions. Secondly, the difference between the mentoring concept and other similar concepts, particularly leadership and social support, is discussed. Thirdly, the effects of mentoring at individual and organizational levels are described based on the findings yielded from the precedent research.
The author proposes the definition of mentoring concept in the business organization, which can be described contingent upon fulfilling five conditions. The significance of mentoring studies in work organizations is also discussed from the view-point of human resource development practices.

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One of the most widely believed axioms of management is that a happy worker is a productive worker. However, most research on the nature of relationships between job satisfaction and job performance has not yielded convincing evidence that such a relationship exists to the degree most managers believe. One reason for this might lie in the way in which job performance is measured. Numerous studies have reported that using Organizational Citizenship Behavior to supplant more traditional measures of job performance may result in more robust relationship between job satisfaction and job performance. Although citizenship behavior has been regarded as an important factor and done as a daily work in Japanese company, little research has focused on it. In this study 71 employees who work for the Japanese company were interviewed and found that the most employees engaged in the citizenship behavior for their selfinterests. And then a questionnaire survey was conducted with 403 subjects who provided self-report answers designed to examine the relationship between citizenship behavior and satisfaction, commitment, and stress. In addition the relationship between citizenship behavior and employees' awareness of evaluation was examined. Results showed support for the relative importance of employees' awareness of evaluation as well as satisfaction. Implications for research on the causes of citizenship are discussed.

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The purpose of this study was to empirically yield item characteristics of three sub-dimensions of organizational commitment scale. Recent studies relevant to organizational commitment have claimed that organizational commitment, perse, contained three sub-dimensions that had been explored in various academic fields. Of such studies, Allen and Meyer (1990) reorganized controversies and developed three-dimensional organizational commitment scale composed of affective, continuance, and normative dimensions, which afterwards has been used frequently in North America, indicating whose high reliability and validity verified empirically. However, past research has not revealed characteristics of items which compose of each subscale neither in North America nor in Japan. In the present study, questionnaire survey was conducted using 292 Japanese workers as respondents and the data were analyzed primarily by exploratory factor analysis to investigate dimensionality, followed by Item Response Theory (IRT) techniques to yield item and test (dimensional) characteristics. Results showed that:(1) dimensional classification was revealed as valid;(2) both attitudinal commitment and normative commitment dimensions were reliable enough; and (3) each item and dimension was well-structured and useful for discriminating and being sensitive for respondents with various levels of latent trait theta. Implications for future research were discussed.

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For this study, an exploreation was made to identify basic features of the Chinese personnel management system which is stated in the Chinese labor law in a compartive perspective. Managers and workers were asked to evaluate the features of Chinese systems in comparison with Japanese and American systems by using the questionnaire method. Results of the study suggested that an unique Chinese system is about to emerge with features as follows.(1) Employment is based on the long-term contract rather than a short-term or lifetime relations.(2) The job assignment is based on the within-group lotation, instead of fixed or flexible assignment.(3) The wage is determined by combining the basic wage with the job-related wage (job plus merit components).(4) In auto industry, HRD is undertaken for creating multi-skill, labor-saving work force.(5) The industrial and labor relations in China is maintained by the Workers Association which is a part of the Chinese social-political systems and also function as a workers' association at the workplace to protect their common interests in harmony with management and the socialist central government. These features were delived from the analyses of response patterns based on the questionnaire data and examined in comparison with Japanese and American systems.

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