Implementation of Future-Focused People-Management in a Large Japanese Automobile Company

Companies have to keep achieving challenging objectives with clear responsibilities in mind to survive in highly competitive environments. Consequently, managers are urged to obtain serious commitments, including long-term motivations, from their subordinates in the workplace. We suggested a behavioral mechanism that describes the relationship between future-oriented needs and motivated behavior at PICMET ´06. According to this mechanism, workers can become highly motivated by associating their future aspirations with the tasks they are currently facing. To motivate technical workers with different activation levels, we incorporated our mechanism in the design of new future-focused people-management measures including three time-based topics: current, short-term future, and long-term future. We analyzed the effects of measures on the activations of 104 workers in the technology development sector of a large Japanese automobile company. As a result, the use of our measures by management had a large impact on subordinates´ activation. Furthermore, we confirmed that long-term future-related discussions have a stronger effect on the activations of initially low-activated technical workers than do short-term future-related discussions. This paper shows how managers should communicate differently with activated or inactivated technical workers.