A longitudinal research project was initiated in 1972 to track the process of management progress in the Japanese corporation.
Results of a 7-year follow-up indicated that the career progress of male college graduates up to the lowest management positions can be predicted quite well based on information collected during the first three years of tenure. Based on these findings, an alternative view of management progress in Japanese organization was suggested. This new view was based on a process of early tournament mobility of managerial talent, rather than on a process of deferred competition. This latter process is commonly believed to be the basic features of management progress in the Japanese organization. The temporal generality of this early tournament mobility view was tested in a 13-year follow-up. Results generally supported the early differentiation view but suggested needed elaborations and refinements. Implications of this model are discussed.

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Effects of the sex of a leader and of a respondent on evaluation of leader behavior were examined from the viewpoint of an implicit leadership theory and theories on sex-role stelectyping. 110 male and 698 female college students rated a Leader Behavior Descriprion Questionnaire (LBDQ) From XII, and Women as Managers Scale (WAMS). Results of the analysis indicated that the sex of both leader and respondent did not affect factor structure of leader behavior description, but did affect the level of leader behavior evaluation. Among male subjects WAMS was found to be contributed only by a limited, stereotyped LBDQ scales, while among female respondents a variety of LBDQ subscales showed significant contributions to WAMS. This indicated a dual-prejudiced view on female leadership.

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Relationship between the stated corporate philosophy and characteristics of the organiza-tional climate of the corporation was examined based on the 5 manufacturing corporations in Aichi Prefecture. Clmate data were collected by using a Semantic Differential format from three different hierarchical levels: subordinate, leader, and superior levels in each corporation. Factor analyses on the climate data produced two orthogonal factors, effectiveness in goal achievement and warmth of the organizational environment. Results of the analysis indicated that in general, especially among less progressive corporations, the effectiveness dimension tended to be rated high at lower levels, while the warmth dimension high at high hierarchical levels. This indicated a lack of communication and insufficient penetration of corporate philosophy across hierachical levels. But, it was found that in some progressive corporations, both dimensions were rated high by all constituent groups. Implications of the findings were disscussed regarding consistency involving a stated philosophy, implementing managerial practices, and an organizational climate perceived by the people in the organization.

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A component analytical model treating the several sets of variables is proposed in this paper. The model has the hierarchical property; The first order composites are defined as linear combinations of variables for each set, and the second order composites are constructed as linear combinations of the first order ones of all the sets. The optimization criterion is the maximization of the sum of alpha coefficients of the second order composites.
The model may be regarded as a natural extension of the ordinary component analysis in Lord's (1958) sense. Through changing the number of the second order composites, the first order composites could be explored in such a way that the latter would be well be well balanced between the internal consistency coefficients and the correlations between the sets.
For this study, an alternating optimization algorithm of the model was formulated as a first part, but the need for examining relationship with other models and demonstrating numerical examples based on this model was stressed for the next study.

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This study aimed at examining (1) how recent environmeatal changes, such as changes in work values among youths, increases in female and aged workforce, and rapid advancement of technological innovation, impact upon personnel management system, and (2) what measures firms are to take to cope with those changes. It is expected that today's rapid and drastic environment changes impose some modification in personnel practices distinctive to Japanese firms, e. g., lifetime employment, seniority systems, and promotion-from-within practices. Open-ended questionnaire date were obtained from personnel managers of 13 firms in Aichi prefecture to examine this issue.
Results indicated that while personnel managers regarded recent environmental changes as serious challenges to cope with, they were still struggling to find out the directions for changes and to develop new personnel systems adaptive to environment changes. It was also revealed there was (1) a lack of systematization among various personnel practices (e. g., performace evaluation and employee development), and (2) a need to centralize major personnel management functions concerning workers' education and training, to cope with the recent changes. These results suggested that existing personnel management systems were required to shift to include strategic human resource management aspects which were designed to integrate total personnel management systems with a corporate strategy.

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