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2
For getting you final score you have to do several tasks:
1. Give the answer to particular question following after cases (in written form). Question and case number you can find in the table below.
2. Do the final task (in written form) in accordance with given instructions and recommendations.
1. Reading Cases
Case 1. “Matsushita (Panasonic) and Japan's Changing Culture”
Established in 1920, the consumer electronics giant Matsushita was at the forefront of the rise of Japan to the status of major economic power during the 1970s and 1980s. Like many other long-standing Japanese businesses, Matsushita was regarded as a bastion of traditional Japanese values based on strong group identification, reciprocal obligations, and loyalty to the company. Several commentators attributed Matsushita's success, and that of the Japanese economy, to the existence of Confucian values in the workplace. At Matsushita, employees were taken care of by the company from "cradle to the grave." Matsushita provided them with a wide range of benefits including cheap housing, guaranteed lifetime employment, seniority-based pay systems, and generous retirement bonuses. In return, Matsushita expected, and got, loyalty and hard work from its employees. To Japan's postwar generation, struggling to recover from the humiliation of defeat, it seemed like a fair bargain. The employees worked hard for the greater good of Matsushita, and Matsushita reciprocated by bestowing "blessings " on employees.
However, culture does not stay constant. According to some observers, the generation born after 1964 lacked the same commitment to traditional Japanese values as their parents. They grew up in a world that was richer, where Western ideas were beginning to make themselves felt, and where the possibilities seemed greater. They did not want to be tied to a company for life, to be a "salaryman." These trends came to the fore in the 1990s, when the Japanese economy entered a prolonged economic slump. As the decade progressed, one Japanese firm after another was forced to change its traditional ways of doing business. Slowly at first, troubled companies started to lay off older workers, effectively abandoning lifetime employment guarantees. As younger people saw this happening, they concluded that loyalty to a company might not be reciprocated, effectively undermining one of the central bargains made in postwar Japan.
Matsushita was one of the last companies to tum its back on Japanese traditions, but in 1998, after years of poor performance, it began to modify traditional practices. The principal agents of change were a group of managers who had extensive experience in Matsushita's overseas operations, and included Kunio Nakamura, who became the chief executive of Matsushita in 2000. Nakamura has said the time he spent as a manager of Matsushita subsidiaries in the United States had a strong impact on him, particularly observing how American managers such as Lou Gestner (who turned around IBM) moved quickly to restructure troubled companies.
Under Nakamura, Matsushita changed the pay scheme for its 11,000 managers. In the past, the traditional twice-a-year bonuses had been based almost entirely on seniority, but now Matsushita said they would be based on performance. Matsushita announced this process would be made transparent; managers would be shown what their performance rankings were and how these fed into pay bonuses. As elementary as this might sound in the West, for Matsushita it represented the beginning of a revolution in human resource practices.