Japanese And British Managerial Colleagues—How They View Each Other

The mutual perceptions were obtained of 113 Japanese and 100 British managers working in the London offices of 18 Japanese companies. Eighteen semantic differential items were used to permit each respondent to report his auto stereotype of his own nationality of manager, his hetero stereotype of the other nationality, and his meta stereotype (his opinion as to how they would assess his own group). The degree of agreement between the auto stereotype of each group and the hetero stereotype held of it by the other group is discussed, and the accuracy of the meta stereotypes is examined. It is also shown that the 18 semantic items can be reduced to 3 principal components which, after rotation, are consistent in meaning between the two nationalities. The three rotated factors are interpretable as ‘approval’, ‘open style’ and ‘functional’. The factors permit a more concise comparison of the stereotypes.