Cultural Issues Some of the cultural issues appeared in this case and these issues further aggravated the

situation for Toyota. Now Japan has a high context culture while US has a low context culture and they carry out their business activities according to their cultures. In low context cultures, a lot of emphasis is laid upon sequencing and separation of time compared to the high context cultures. For instance, Toyota was not quickly responding to the problems of its customers which is not acceptable in the US culture as they want companies to be more responsive to the needs of their customers. To Americans, the responses of Toyota were slow and inadequate as those were not answering to the problems which its customers were facing. Apart from this, another problem can be of communication. In high context cultures, interaction is mainly implicit while in low context cultures, interaction is mainly explicit. For instance, Toyota was not doing a good job in communicating with the public about what is being done and because of this poor communication people started thinking that Toyota was not taking enough measures to improve the quality of their cars. Customers started thinking that to Toyota needs of their customers were not of utmost importance. So, Toyota was unable to communicate well with the public in America because in Japan, implicit form of communication is more preferable. While in low context cultures, more knowledge is codified, public, external, and accessible. Then an another problem in Japanese companies was that they believed that the Chief Executive Officer should not become directly involved in the operational activities of the business. This belief secluded CEO from speaking to the public which further aggravated the situation as people started thinking that Toyota was not paying much attention to the problems which its customers were facing. However, there is no such belief in US people. In America, CEO becomes involved in the operations of company. Additionally, in US, association is task oriented meaning that decisions and activities focus around what needs to be done, while in Japan association is relation oriented where decisions and activities focus around personal face-to-face relationships, often around a central person who has authority. For example CEO of Toyota apologized to the customers of Toyota believing that they will forgive him because in Japan an apology goes a long way toward

forgiven. However, this was not the case in America as Americans were more interested in solution to the problem rather than the apology. So, Toyota should have focused much on providing solution to its customers and for that they should have been more task oriented as US people look for solution to the problems. Besides, another difference between Japan and America can be of association. For example in high context societies, social structure is centralized, while in low context societies social structure is decentralized. For example managers working for Toyota in China were unable to solve the wages problem of the Chinese workers as they could not make any changes without approvals from Japan. Moreover, this highly centralized structure resulted in poor upward communication. Furthermore, in case of Toyota interaction was mostly being done indirectly while in US preference is given to direct interaction which also resulted in poor communication.