Information dissemination in the age of globalisation: what are the barriers and how can we help? Analysis of the results of a message-game experiment.

Abstract

In today's global business world, the ability to provide the expected goods and services with a shared corporate philosophy, an adherence to quality, and a consistency across the procedures is a key issue that can determine the survival of the company. To achieve this, each company must share a unified runbook among its global branches, which provides the basis of a unified quality maintenance and sustainability strategy for the business. The runbook essentially presents a repository of know-how for a company, a corporate competency in itself. However, there are a number of cases where the instructions using the runbook have worked well in the home nation (Japan) but did not necessarily translate well to the branches in other countries or regions. The question remains as to why this should be. To answer this question, a message-game experiment involving graduate students was conducted, and it was found that unfamiliar words can cause significant information attenuation, i.e., unfamiliar words cannot be remembered and certain aspects of the instruction that the leader aims to get across may not be understood at all by the information receivers. In the experiment, an empirical test was conducted according to our previously developed ‘information propagation model’ (Yamaoka & Oe, 2021) aimed at better understanding the characteristics of the way information flows in the global age. As a result, it was confirmed that simply translating the runbook into Japanese and applying it to employers experiencing different socio-cultural contexts will not achieve the desired goal, and the introduction of the concept of a universal design was thus proposed as one solution.