Eicosanoids and Nsaids Lecture

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Slide: Culture in Japan - Importance of working for the right company

This is just a simple example on the importance of one’s company in Japan. Besides the renting of apartments, many other aspects such as purchasing your apartment, your potential future spouse, your children’s school all depends on which company you work for. The company you work for serves as a yardstick to show your capabilities.

Toshiba is considered one of the big three companies in Japan. Working for Toshiba holds a lot of prestige and honour, that is you are highly respected by society just because you work in Toshiba. Employees would want to stay in Toshiba for as long as they could because of the prestige and they would do anything in order to remain in Toshiba

Slide: Workplace culture in Toshiba

Next we look at the workplace culture in Toshiba. There is a strong adherence to corporate values, such as obedience, loyalty to the organisation and a desire to maintain harmonious conformity – values reinforced by lifetime employment, which is still the carrot-and-stick norm in large Japanese companies like Toshiba.

Besides that, there was no room for mistakes to be made, making a mistake could be detrimental to one’s career and future.

Hence due to this culture within Japan and Toshiba, employees are afraid to disobey their superiors and voice out their opinions, making a mistake or offending their superior, fearing for their careers. That is why the accounts were continuously falsified and no employee stood up to report on the mistakes.

Earlier on, Ivory mentioned that superiors placed high pressure on employees to achieve unrealistic profit targets, and sometimes the targets are only set when there was insufficient time to achieve them. Apparently unable to face the shame of presiding over what they regarded as an embarrassingly weak performance by Toshiba, the former presidents set impossibly high profit targets – euphemistically called “challenges” – and made sure their Toshiba company chiefs understood what had to be done.This could be because they was under pressure from society to ensure the continuous success for Toshiba so everyone could continue to enjoy the benefits of working for the big three.

Now, Samuel will further elaborate on what fueled the former presidents to commit this scandal besides the culture.

Sam

The use of punishment and threats can also be used to explain why employees complied with faking accounting books.

During accounting period, there was severe pressure on employees to improve figures

IE: 2009, with fiscal year ending 2 months later, PC division projected actual loss of 18.4 billion. Nishida rejected it, saying it should be reduced by at least 10 billion, even threatening to pull Toshiba out of the business entirely if it failed to do so.

Such threats forced employees to fake the accounting books for fear of not being able to meet impossible targets and facing unemployment

Next I shall be passing the time on to Gina to discuss our recommendations.