This article investigates the current trend toward cell production and other workplace innovations in Japan using a large-scale sampling survey of manufacturing firms and in-depth interviews with four leading electrical and electronic establishments. The quantitative analysis reveals the...

Coordination within organizations has been recognized as an issue of central importance in the organizational economics literature, where the degree of interdependence between individuals’ actions is taken as given. In reality, however, the degree of interdependence is affected by the choice...

Using the personnel and transaction data from a large auto dealership in Japan, this paper discusses the value, incentives, assignments, determinants of performance, and learning of managers. We find that: (1) moving one standard deviation up the distribution of manager fixed effects raises a...

Using data from a questionnaire survey focusing on firms from Japan, China, and South Korea, this paper empirically examines the complementarity between product architecture and human resource (HR) management. The results of the analysis can be summarized as follows. First, in Japan and Korea,...

Subjective performance evaluation serves as a double-edged sword. While it can mitigate multitasking agency problems, it also opens the door to evaluators’ biases, resulting in lower job satisfaction and a higher rate of worker quits. Using the personnel and transaction records of individual...