•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 lab
A．The difference between Americans and Japanese
B．American employees working for Sony
C．How Sony established business in the United States
D．How Japanese manage their business
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