Investigation report of communication at the first meeting to improve working environment for Japanese IT employees with overseas assignment in the Philippines

Nowadays, the globalization is rapidly increasing and many Japanese employees are going overseas. The first author has experienced assignment in the Philippines for globalization, but the first author had a stumbling block in work-related communication with the local workers and felt difficulty to adopt globalization. Our interviews confirmed that most Japanese IT workers assigned to the Philippines had similar experiences that the problem was difficult to take measures in advance. A sense of unease was revealed in surveys conducted in 2002 by Nishida on intercultural communication frictions in Japanese companies in the Philippines entitled “Japanese Cultural Differences Felt by Filipinos” and “Roles Sought From Japanese Bosses and Leaders by Filipinos”. Although many studies have been done on communication and interpersonal relations and it is often stated that conscious communication from the initial stages is vital to building interpersonal relationships, there are still few practical studies on the matter. Instead of initial stage communication, we focused on the first meeting conversation, conducted questionnaires on topics selection among Japanese and Filipino IT workers, verified differences in topic selection mutually using quantitative evaluation, and reported investigative results on possible reason why smooth interpersonal relationships could not be built from the initial stages.