The Japanese place a greater emphasis on productivity
improvement. Unlike the Europeans and the Americans,
they are not great productivity measurers. Stainer[7]
states that the Japan Management Association produced
a study in 1985 which reported that while 79 per cent of
European and US companies had adopted formal work
measurement, the corresponding figure for Japanese
industry was only 33 per cent; little has changed in recent
years. One possible reason for this difference is that wage
incentive systems, supported by work measurement, are
far more common in the West than in Japan