Seniority or performance? How are Japanese salaries calculated?
japan.internet.com recently reported on a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into personel systems, in particular in this report, in how salaries are calculated.
Demographics
On the 30th of April 2007 JR Tokai Express Research questioned 330 members of their online monitor panel employed in either private or public enterprises. 67.3% were female, 15.2% in their twenties, 42.1% in their thirties, 31.2% in their forties, 9.4% in their fifties, and 2.1% in their sixties.
My salary is performance based with a horrendously complex evaluation system that changes almost every year. I’m just coming up to setting my targets for this year, which, as with the two 6-monthly reviews of progress towards these set goals, consists largely of horse-trading and inventing ratings so you don’t look either too good or too bad, and of course being foreign I don’t quite fit into the system, so more pointless tweaking takes place to make allowances. They have a box for TOEIC score, so instead I put down my Kanji Kentei targets, but “write like a Japanese middle-school student” is hardly a major achievement from a Japanese perspective! An ex-colleague had the right idea - he just refused to fill in any form that wasn’t in English.
Survey results
Q1: Is your salary based on performance or length of service? (Sample size=330)
Performance 38.8% Length of service 41.8% Don’t know 13.3% Not currently working in industry 2.4% Other 3.6% Q2: In which industry do you work? (Sample size=266)
Length of service
N=138Performance
N=128Manufacturing 17 38 Central or local government, or other public body 49 5 Education 16 5 Health, welfare 3 1 Finance, insurance 5 7 Distribution, service 25 45 Construction, real estate 6 6 Utilites, broadcast 13 13 Other 4 8 Q3: In which field do you work? (Sample size=266)
Length of service
N=138Performance
N=128Sales 12 22 Research 14 6 Clerical 59 23 Management 12 26 Shop work 2 6 Specialist 36 41 Other 3 4 Q4: In the future, how would you like your salary assessed? (Sample size=330)
By performance 46.1% By length of service 23.3% Other 5.1% Don’t know 25.5%
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Shari said,
May 17, 2007 @ 09:27
I’m highly dubious of these results. The problem is that even when Japanese companies say performance matters, it doesn’t. As you described with your own situation, rather than a true objective evaluation, some sort of ratings system is concocted to allow them to give you whatever raise they want to by making you appear adequate rather than great or poor. The reason they change it every year is to make sure they can adjust the evaluation to suit their internal target no matter how well you perform. You can’t possibly exceed expectations if those expectations are in flux arbitrarily moving the bar so you can neither get too far ahead of it or behind it. The evaluations are just a farce in many cases which are designed to make it appear that you are getting a raise based on performance which is exactly equal to the raise they want to give you based on seniority.
If you add the fact that people actively want to believe their performance matters and are therefore more likely to report that it is factored into salary, you have a high possibility of false affirmatives to any question regarding a link between salary and performance.