First Advisor

L. David Ritchie

Term of Graduation

Summer 1997

Date of Publication

8-11-1997

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.) in Speech Communication

Department

Speech Communication

Language

Other

Subjects

Trust, Businesspeople -- Japan, Businesspeople -- United States, Intercultural communication -- Japan, Intercultural communication -- United States

Physical Description

1 online resource (3, viii, 184 pages)

Abstract

Since trust has been reported as an important component in both Japanese and U.S. organizations, the indication of lack of trust between Japanese and U.S. employees in Japanese subsidiaries is of great concern to management. If one wants to improve the level of trust between Japanese and U.S. employees, one must explore the reasons why they sometimes do not trust each other. Since there many be cultural differences between the two groups in the concept of trustworthiness, the first step is to examine whether Japanese and U.S. employees share the same notion of what constitutes a trustworthy person. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the differences and similarities in work settings.

This study was conducted in three stages. In the first stage, a series of interviews were conducted with seven Japanese and six U.S. business people. In the second stage, a card sorting procedure was used to explore the categorical and dimensional structure of Japanese and U.S. business people's concept of trustworthiness. Each of 115 Japanese and 121 U.S. subjects were asked to sort a set of 30 trust-related labels identified in the first stage. Hierarchical cluster analyses (HCA) and Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) were conducted on the aggregated cooccurence matrices for all pairs of labels. In the third stage, the same subjects who participated in the second stage were asked to select the three labels that best expressed the most important aspects of being a trustworthy boss and trustworthy subordinate respectively.

The result from each stage suggested some similarities and differences between Japanese and U.S. business people's concept of trustworthiness. Both Japanese and U.S. subjects emphasized competence as a key aspect in the concept of trustworthiness. One major difference between Japanese and U.S. results was the fact that Japanese subject emphasized the importance of organizational commitment, while U.S. subjects emphasized the importance of personal integrity in judging another's trustworthiness. Based on these findings, it was suggested that Japanese business people have an interdependent view of trustworthiness, while U.S. people have an independent view of trustworthiness.

Rights

In Copyright. URI: http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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Comments

Text in English and Japanese.

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44513

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