A Comparative Fieldwork Study on the Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese Multinational Managers as a Significant Factor of Global Corporate Competition in China

The rise of the Korean multinationals is one of the most dramatic stories of East Asian post-development era. Many of the front runners of Korean companies could even catch up with the Japanese multinationals and eventually became crucial global players in major manufacturing industries. The rise of the Korean companies in global business world has never been predicted by any of the existing social theories. In order to explain how companies really move in East Asia, we must look deeper into the managerial fields where real corporate people from different countries are working for the companies. This paper is a trial to find significant relations between ups and downs of Asian multinational companies in China by paying attention on human resources factors. This study is especially concerned on the role of Korean multinational expatriates in comparison with the Japanese and Taiwanese counterparts competing in China. We have been focusing on the uniqueness of Korean multinational expatriates and try to relate the recent achievement of the Korean multinationals with distinctive human factors of the Korean companies. This paper is trying to suggest meaningful connections between human factor and company performances, which has been largely neglected by existing political and economic theories. In conclusion, this paper is addressing 'human resources' as one of the essential factors explaining company performances. Even though it is very confined to limited number of global companies, Korean companies and their employees try to train, educate, and mobilize more experienced and talented international human resources in China compared with those of the Japanese and Taiwanese, and this may provide us one of the reasons for their higher performances.