International Internship: Business Education for Leadership and Trust

Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between collective knowledge creation and organizational behavior. The data were obtained during an international internship in which Japanese university students participated in August 2014 in Malaysia. The international internship gave rise to two research aims. The first was to inquire whether collective knowledge can be formed by amateur participants rather than experts who possess technical knowledge. In this project, the creation of collective knowledge was assessed by the scores given by managers in the participating company. We observed that amateur students created utilizable knowledge for a manufacturing company. The second research aim was to assess the relationship between trustworthiness and leadership. Who was identified as having leadership qualities? Who can be regarded as a trustworthy person? Can we observe the process by which students grow to trust one another over time? Our research methods involved participating students who answered a series of questionnaire surveys through a website. Leadership and trustworthiness were analyzed through a network analysis of the students’ responses. The results of the network analysis revealed four important findings. First, the managers gave high evaluations of the student proposals, which indicated that collective knowledge was created during the international internship. Second, trust was created among the students, who shared a common purpose with time pressure. Third, a student whom students recognized as a leader did not earn their trust. Finally, students with high leadership scores found jobs in larger companies. Hence, the experiment does not support the belief that a person exercising leadership is trusted by subordinate members. The leadership scores had a positive relationship with firm size, but the trust scores did not. These results suggest that leadership would be emphasized in a society with a high turnover ratio with job recruitment, whereas trustworthiness may be sought in a society with a norm of long-term commitment to a workplace.