Tigers, dragons, and others:: Profiling high performance in Asian firms

A comparison of samples of business-to-business firms based in major cities in China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam finds significant differences across countries on several organizational dimensions, including innovativeness, market orientation, and organizational climate and culture. The work is framed in a modified competing values model that is based on theoretical work from the West, but the developmental work for empirical application was carried out in Japan. In general, the differences observed in Asia are consistent with the countries historical and cultural differences. Notably, however, the impact of the organizational dimensions on firm performance is statistically identical across the countries. Tests of hypotheses related to performance of firms in the Asian samples produced results that are qualitatively similar to a previous study of five industrial countries, but the importance weights of the individual factors are different. In particular, the significant effect of market orientation on performance is greater in Asia, whereas the similarly significant impact of innovativeness on performance is greater in the industrial countries.