2025 Theses Doctoral

How Japanese Managers in the Information Technology Industry Experience Cultural Diversity in the Workplace: Host Culture Perceptions in Light of Constructive-Developmental Theory

Mizukoshi, Kaori

This exploratory qualitative study was initiated to investigate an understudied area regarding individual experiences with cultural diversity in the workplace. Specifically, it focused on how eight Japanese managers—the host culture individuals of Japan, a presumed culturally homogeneous country—experienced cultural diversity in their workplaces in the information industry and how these experiences related to their epistemological capacities. The premise of this study is that an increase in cultural diversity in Japan is inevitable and that the Japanese, the overwhelming cultural majority in Japanese society today, may need educational support to better navigate the complexity and uncertainty brought about by cultural diversity.

The study aimed to explore how the Japanese managers describe the benefits and challenges of cultural diversity brought by foreign colleagues to their workplaces, and their actions and guiding values in working with them. Using Robert Kegan’s constructive-developmental theory (1982, 1994) as a theoretical framework, it also sought to shed light on how their epistemological capacities explain the similarities, differences, or patterns in those descriptions. Data was primarily collected first, through semi-structured interviews, to learn about their experiences in workplace cultural diversity and second, by employing the subject-object interviews (Kegan, 1994; Lahey et al., 2011), that constitute a core element of the constructive-developmental theory’s methodology, to learn about their epistemological development.

The descriptions from the eight Japanese managers during the interviews highlighted key cultural differences they perceived, their values and actions in supporting and relating to foreign colleagues, and their new understandings of their own cultural assumptions. Meanwhile, in light of the constructive-developmental theory, differences were observed between those who tended to rely on external sources for their perceptions and actions and those who firmly held internal values and standards in their perceptions and actions regarding cultural differences.

Due to the small number of participants and the extensive variability of the context of their experiences, the findings of the study were somewhat fragmented and cannot be generalized. Nonetheless, this study provided preliminary insights into promising directions of future research and the formulation of educational support to facilitate growth in Japanese leaders’ developmental capacity to help them better navigate the complexity and uncertainty brought about by cultural diversity in their home country.