How Can Multinational Companies Claim to Value Teamwork and Collaboration, While Still Appraise Performance Individually?

1) The Traditional Context of Teamwork in Asia

Across many cultures in Asia, but perhaps in particular in Japan and Korea, there has always been a strong tendency towards defining oneself by what group one belongs to. This behaviour is not going to change any day soon — it’s not just a case of these practices being ingrained in everyday society, but it’s even part of the language itself, where there can be many different ways of saying even simple words such as “I’ and “you” depending on the perceived societal grouping of the speaker versus the listener. This has traditionally translated itself into corporate behaviours, and most Japanese and Korean companies have strong notions of teamwork and collaboration, where employees quite naturally put the good of the team and overall company goals above their own individual status. And even with multinational companies, the Japan and Korea affiliates have often promoted these traditional management methods above those prescribed from global and regional headquarters. So remuneration and appraisal processes would follow the same logic, and the company would view the successes and failures of a team rather than of their individual constituent members.

2) The Conflict

And that’s where conflict can arise. As multinationals continue to bring increased uniformity across their global affiliates, we have been witnessing a sea change in Japan and Korea business operating models. One by one, HR Directors at multinational companies in these countries are successfully converting traditional remuneration structures (particularly those defined by length of service) into more Western-style individual performance-based models. But here’s the dichotomy… How can a multinational company claim to value teamwork and collaboration while still push towards having this individual-based approach to appraisals? If they truly valued teamwork, then a Korean or Japanese employee can quite logically argue that they should have kept the traditional team-based remuneration and appraisal structure in place. And if a company also claims to promote diversity of thinking within the global context, then why can’t Japan and Korea work in a style that makes most sense to their individual cultures and markets?

3) The Solution

In the case of most multinational companies, there is limited patience for hearing these arguments. The Global and Regional HR team leader can quite rightly argue that if individual performance appraisals can work in Guatemala, Greece and Guinea, then there’s no reason why it can’t work in Asia. The notions of teamwork and collaboration can be built into a person’s individual performance appraisal, and there’s no logical absurdity in giving someone an individual appraisal based on their personal contribution to team goals. However, there are a small minority of companies that are starting to re-think this approach, particularly if they see more of their global footprint represented in Asia. While most companies still prefer to have a very centralised model of creating global HR strategy, some are starting to allow ideas and values to come ‘up the food chain’ from local HR practices into the global sphere. 

Some companies are now starting to experiment with group appraisals, where a whole team will collaborate together to ascertain their group performance. Within the group, they can discuss the performance of each individual, but the details of each individual’s contributions are not later shared with the external performance evaluator. The company then awards the group their performance bonus, after which it is up to the team leader to decide how this gets apportioned internally within the group. 

At the moment we haven’t heard of many international companies who have made this wholesale shift in thinking, particularly because of the vested interests of the incumbent global HR team, who have themselves been responsible for creating and implementing these individual-based performance appraisal approaches globally in their companies. But as we see more multinational Asian companies rise in prominence over the coming years, we may also see more openness in some companies to at first experiment with these group team appraisal systems, and perhaps to allow some teams, countries or businesses to adopt these hybrid models in the future.