2. 职称英语
  3. • Read the following article about Japanese style of management and the quest

• Read the following article about Japanese style of management and the quest

游客2025-05-30  2
问题    • Read the following article about Japanese style of management and the questions.
   • For each question (15-20), mark one letter (A, B, C or D) on your Answer Sheet.
      Time clocks are banned from the premises.  Managers and workers converse on a first- name basis and eat lunch together in the company cafeteria. Employees are briefed once a month by a top executive on sales and production goals and are encouraged to air their complaints. Four times a year, workers attend company-paid parties.  Says Tom Zolick, 49, an assembly-line worker. "Working for Sony is like working for your family."
     His expression, echoed by dozens of other American Sony workers in San Diego, is a measure of success achieved at the sprawling two-story plant, where both the Stars and Stripes and the Rising Sun fly in front of the factory’s glistening white exterior.  In 1981 the San Diego plant turned over 700,000 color television sets, one-third of Sony’s total world production. More significantly, company officials now proudly say that the plant’s productivity approaches that of its Japanese branches.
     Plant manager Tery Osaka, 47, insists that there are few differences between workers in the United States and Japan.  Says he. "Americans are as quality conscious as the Japanese.  But the question is how to motivate them." Osaka’s way is to bathe his U.S.  employees in personal attention.  Workers with perfect attendance records are treated to dinner once a year at a luxurious restaurant downtown.  When one employee complained that a refrigerator for storing lunches was too small, it was replaced a few days later with a larger one.  Vice-President Masayoshi Yamada, known as Mike around the plant, has mastered Spanish so he can talk with his many Hispanic workers.  The company has installed telephone hot lines on which workers can anonymously register suggestions or complaints.
     The firm strives to build strong ties with its employees in the belief that the workers will then show loyalty to the company in return.  It carefully promotes from within, and most of the assembly-line supervisors are high school graduates who rose through the ranks because of their hard work and dedication to the company.  During the 1973-1975 recession, when TV sales dropped and production slowed drastically, no one was fired. Instead, workers were kept busy with plant maintenance and other chores.  In fact, Sony has not laid off a single employee since 1972, when plant was opened.  The Japanese managers were stunned when the first employee actually quit within one year.  Says John Ford, the plant’s human relations expert: "They came to me and wanted to know what they had done wrong.  I had to explain that quitting is just the way it is sometimes in Southern California."
     This personnel policy has clearly been a success.  Several attempts to unionize the work force have been defeated by margins as high as 3 to 1. Says Jan Timmerman, 22, a parts dispatcher and former member of the Retail Clerks Union. "Union pay was better, and the benefits were probably larger. But basically I’m more satisfied here."
      Sony has not forced American workers to accept Japanese customs.  Though the company provides lemon-colored smocks for assembly-line workers, most of them prefer to wear jeans and running shoes. The firm doesn’t demand that anyone put on uniforms. A brief attempt to establish a general exercise period for San Diego workers, similar to the kind Sony’s Japanese employees perform, was dropped when managers saw it was not wanted.
     Inevitably, there have been minor misunderstandings because of the differences in language and customs. One worker sandblasted the numbers 1264 on a series of parts she was testing before she realized that her Japanese supervisor meant that she was to label them "1 to 64".  Mark Crossy, 22, the plant’s youngest supervisor, admits that there is a vast cultural gap between the Japanese and Americans.  Says he:" They don’t realize that some of us live for the weekend, while lots of them live for the week—just so they can begin to work again." Some workers grumble about the delays caused by the Japanese system of managing by consensus, seeing it instead as an inability to make decisions. Complains one American worker: "There is a lot of indecision. No manager will ever say do this or do that."
       Most American workers, though, like the Japanese management style, and some do not find it all that foreign.  Says Supervisor Robert Williams. "A long time ago, Americans used to be more people-oriented, the way the Japanese are.  It just got lost somewhere along the way."  [br] What can we infer from the passage about the American employers?
选项 A、They are better educated than Japanese employers
B、They were stricter with their employees before
C、They are more concerned with their employees than they used to be
D、They do not show as much concern for their employees now as they used to
答案 D
解析 在文章第六段提到，熟悉这种管理方式的员工数量在减少，因为管理者认为没有必要再这样做。由此可以推测出．美国籍管理者对员工的关注度不如从前，故答案为D。
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