254 Didik Purwadi / Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 65 ( 2012 ) 253 – 259
Workforce that means human resource must be planned from the beginning of their career until their
retirement age. Human Resource Planning should be done to avoid redundant employees and lack of
employment in the near future.
Managers work with three organizational resources: physical, financial and human resource. Of the
three, human resource is the most important since it has a strategic place. The Carnegie Foundation says
that 85% of the factors of success are due to the personal qualities and only 15% can be attributed to
technical knowledge.
1.2. Previous Research
Hwang and Kogan (2003) described that human resource planning has always been a key issue to
professional companies, explicitly considering its structure, cost of recruitment and hiring, workload, etc.
Moreover Purwadi et al (1999) explained that the Japanese management style has given a good condition
for planning the human resource itself. Lifetime employment system gives a good relationship between
employers and employees. Rough behavior of cutting excess employees is unacceptable in Japan.
Companies and their employees work together, and employees work for the same company throughout
their entire life. They give all their effort for the company. Companies hire the inexperienced younger
people, then educate and train them. Companies should avoid dismissing employees as much as possible
by resorting to various employment adjustment mechanisms. Geelhaar et al (2003) explained that many
new topics, interdisciplinary team work and the call for fast success in learning are challenges for
advanced training. Nagaraj and Kamalanabhan (2005) concluded that there is a link between the business
strategy pursued by the firm and its human resource policies and practices.
1.3. Purpose
The purposes of this paper are (1) elaborate the characteristics of Japanese style of management,
especially for dealing with human resource planning; (2) provide a deep discussion on the practices of
Japanese human resource planning; (3) evaluate the role of human resource planning practices for
increasing industrial competitiveness.
2. Method
System approach is methodology research which is very important for compromising the different subsystem
interests. Planning human resource faces some different sub-system interests, such as recruitment
system, training and promotion system, retirement system, etc. There are also some actors which have
different interest, such as workers, managers, employers, and may be government. After designing a
system, it is important to analyze the external factors which influence to the system. This paper uses the
secondary data and the result of previous research for building a deep descriptive-qualitative analysis.
3. Human Resource Planning in the Japanese style of Management
Japanese style of management at least consists of 3 characteristics: lifetime employment system,
seniority waged-based system, and company based labour union. Most of them are dealing to the human
resource issues, especially for human resource planning. Design a Human Resource Planning is begun by
need analysis. What kind of workers will be needed for near future? Recruitment strategy should be
decided in order to increase company's effectiveness and efficiency. Training and promotion should be
planned in order to decrease unproductive human resource. Redundancy which is caused by unbalanced
condition between desired man-hours and potential man-hours becomes a serious problem particularly in