Going Global: Culture, Gender, and Authority in the Japanese Subsidiary of an American Corporation

Chapter 3. Uncertainty, Trust, and Commitment: Defining the Self in Relation to Employment at Transco

❖ T here is little doubt that employees at Transco and elsewhere think about themselves in relation to their work organizations on a regular basis.Where choices are at least presumed to exist , employees analyze why one choice of a workplace is better than another, and corporations such as Transco spend considerable time and energy convincing both potential and existing employees why it is the best choice at different stages of their career trajectories. Over time employees learn to trust, or not to trust, their company , based on a variety of factors that become more important as one moves up the corporate ladder: a personal sense of fit with the organization, some measure of predictability in regard to corporate expectations of employee performance, evidence that solid performance will lead to a continuing career path, and a belief that one understands both organizational objectives and the working concepts and principles behind those objectives. This chapter further explores these factors. We already know from Chapter 2 that satisfaction with both career and company increased as Japanese men and women advanced in the organizational hierarchy, with women generally ranking these factors higher. However, in terms of satisfaction with career guidance and clarity 3 Uncertainty,Trust, and Commitment: Defining the Self in Relation to Employment at Transco of evaluations, women rank these factors far lower than men do. Given that career guidance and performance evaluations involve one-on-one interaction with an employee’s superiors, some amount of personal uncertainty is likely generated in the process, and for women this form of uncertainty paralleled men’s uncertainty with the corporation at large. Transco recognized women’s career uncertainty as a problem, listing coaching of women as a specific target for improvement.The problem was that solutions were vague, for example, asking Human Resources to provide “appropriate support,” and did not address the behavior of bosses directly. Nothing seemed to be in the offing to address men’s uncertainty; I do not think that particular form of uncertainty was even recognized in any organization-wide way. Efforts to rationalize further the criteria of either career advancement or effective implementation of concepts that flow down from the top of the corporation will not eliminate the problems because perfectly rational bureaucracy is impossible.1 Organizations, large ones in particular, face uncertainty at all levels of operation on a daily basis. The need for personal discretion therefore becomes unavoidable and increases in intensity as one moves up the occupational hierarchy. Discretion, in turn, intensifies key human issues of trust, loyalty, commitment, mutual understanding and shared values that rarely rise in technical matters, all of which are in return reaffected by uncertainty: It is the uncertainty quotient in managerial work, as it has come to be defined in the large modern corporation, that causes management to become so socially restricting: to develop tight inner circles excluding social strangers; to keep control in the hands of socially homogenous peers; to stress conformity and insist upon a diffuse, unbounded loyalty; and to prefer ease of communication and thus social certainty over the strains of dealing with people who are ‘different .’ (Kanter 1977:49) Kanter does make the important point that mutual trust can be established by means other than social homogeneity, in particular by 56 Chapter 3 a “similarity of organizational experience” (1977: 50), but the requisite time is much longer.We still can only hopefully assume that over time women’s continued presence in an organization is likely to override considerations of gender.Yet, three decades after Kanter ’s book appeared, we were not yet there for managerial women in numbers that were commensurate with their presence in organizations as a whole, and the Japanese of either gender at Transco were not yet trusted to take the reins of the subsidiary despite their presence in the company for a similar period of time. Mutual trust is said to be part of the “Japanese management creed” (Tomita 1991), but in this sense the trust appears to be as important along vertical lines as it is along horizontal lines.The necessity for vertical lines of trust may be in contrast to the Western corporation, where expectations of competency transfer along vertical lines, but expectations of personal trust are more important among peers within different levels than between levels. The primacy of horizontal lines of trust is one motivation for the increase in self-replication (Kanter’s 1977 social homogeneity) as the...