Chapter 6: Japanese MNCs’ Global Leadership Challenges: Why Cultural and Emotional Intelligence Matter and Why They Do Not Have Enough of Them?

The chapter introduces two case studies highlighting the significant difficulties many Japanese multinational corporations (MNCs) have faced in recent years. They reveal misalignment between global strategies, cross-border organizational structures, and such organizational capabilities as comparative management perspectives and cross-cultural communication based on compassion and mindfulness. In doing so, the chapter presents the much broader underlying issue of the embeddedness of firms in their home institutions and the influence of those institutions on their strategies, organizational structures, and capabilities.