Foreign or National?

The study addresses the issue of female employment in foreign companies in Japan by introducing a conceptual framework that integrates the theoretical perspective of the Japanese business culture and system of values used in intercultural research with the empirical description of the present-day growing “generation and gender gap” from the literature on intercultural management. The article further reports on a qualitative, in-depth study of work-related expectations of the Japanese female employees of foreign companies. Participants shared the reasons for choosing foreign companies as a place of employment and detailed the differences they perceived between the “classical” Japanese corporate culture in terms of gender roles and western companies’ culture, as well as their level of satisfaction with western organisations’ cultures and HR practices. The implications of these findings suggest that female employees of foreign firms generally assess their work environment more positively than with respect to Japanese companies. The women mention a higher level of correspondence of HR practices of foreign companies with their individual values and job expectations.