Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector is playing a significant role in Japanese economy. However, over the last two decades, SMEs have no longer been a thriving source of growth. The firm entry rate has downward trend while exit rate has trended upward in recent years and considerably exceeded the entry rate. One of the reasons for the high rate of business failures in SMEs, is due to its less attention to the human side of their businesses when compared with their counter parts of large enterprises. High voluntary turnover is considered to be the one of critical problem for SME owner/managers among many other human resource issues. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to examine the relationship between Human Resource Management (HRM) practices and voluntary turnover in SMEs in Japan. Specifically, this study attempts to examine the relationship between HRM practices and voluntary turnover shedding some lights on the mediating effect of the link in between HRM practices and turnover rate. A structured questionnaire was developed and sent to 436 SMEs in Aichi Prefecture and 144 firms responded to the questionnaire resulting in 32 percent response rate. Based on the data analysis it was found that there is negative but weak relationship, partially mediated by HR outcomes, between HRM practices and voluntary turnover rate in manufacturing SMEs in Japan.

Extant research has examined women's under-representation (relative to men) in international careers in respect to: prejudice towards women in host countries; organisational resistance to selecting women; women's own disinterest in taking international work, and host country societal expectations of women. Though research has suggested the benefits for global organisations of having management diversity, the literature has given limited consideration to barriers and opportunities for international careers for women from developing countries. This study addresses this gap in examining the perceptions of 243 professional women in Sri Lanka about factors they perceive affect opportunities for international careers. The findings suggest the women perceive that positive female role models and family/husband support may facilitate opportunities whereas prejudice in host countries, organisational gender discrimination, and home country societal values emphasising a primary responsibility of women as wives, mothers and daughters may hinder opportunities. The research has business implications in that, given a global aging population and increasing numbers of non-traditional families, organisations seeking to achieve gender and ethnic diversity amongst their international cross-cultural managers need to be cognisant of supporting employees with extended family responsibilities.

The purpose of this study is to examine the mediating effects of organizational commitment on the relationship between transformational leadership style and employees’ job performance in the Divisional Secretariats in Jaffna District. 287 employees were selected for this study. Leadership styles were measured using MLQ Rater Form 5-x, employee performance was measured using job performance Scale and organizational commitment was measured using Organizational Commitment Questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis was performed to get factor structure and confirmatory factor analysis performed to confirm the validly and reliability of the study instruments. The results revealed that transformational leadership has a positive impact on job performance and on organizational commitment. It was also found that organizational commitment doesn’t have a mediating effect in the impact of transformational leadership on employee performance. The findings also revealed that organizational commitment doesn’t have impact on employee performance. This study recommends that the leaders should pay more attention in their leadership style as a way to improve employee performance. This study further suggests that future researchers should cover larger samples and the other public sector organizations to better understand the relationship between the variables.

Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) constitute a large proportion of the overall business population of industrially developed and developing nations. Despite the growing importance of SME research during the last decade, very little attention has been paid to the study of training and development practices in SMEs. This article sets out to redress this imbalance in current SME research. It outlines the preliminary results of a recent study that focused on determinants of training & development practices in manufacturing SMEs in Japan. The results of the analysis indicate that the attitude of owner/manager and organizational support towards training & development are the key determinants of training intensity in SMEs in Japan.

This paper aims at empirically investigating job satisfaction on job performance of the sailors in Rapid Action Boat Squadron in Sri Lanka Navy. Data were collected from 219 sailors using Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire (MSQ) and the structured questionnaire developed by Udayakumar (2003) was used for measuring job performance. Pearson Correlation Coefficient and Curve Fit Analysis were employed for the analysis of data. The study substantiated that there is a fairly positive relationship between job satisfaction and job performance of the sailors. The results suggest that the satisfaction aspect on its own does necessarily lead to improved individual performance and assumedly organizational effectiveness. Therefore, it needs to implement satisfaction-performance model effectively through specific practices. The paper empirically investigated satisfaction-performance model in Rapid Action Boat Squadron of Sri Lanka Navy context and offers practical implications for top level administration of the Squadron seeking effective implementation of the satisfaction-performance model.