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This study aims to examine the effect of relative leader-member exchange (RLMX) on employee voice by developing a moderated mediation model. The model focuses on the mediating role of affective commitment underpinning the relationship between RLMX and employee voice, and the moderating role of Chinese traditionality in influencing the mediation.

We tested the model with data from 358 supervisor-subordinate dyads in a large Chinese company. Employees and their immediate supervisors provided data on separate questionnaires and on different occasions. And then, we used an identification number to match each employee questionnaire with the response of his/her immediate supervisor.

Results indicated that affective commitment fully mediated the positive relationship between RLMX and employee voice, even after controlling for personal leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. We also found that Chinese traditionality moderated the mediated relationship between RLMX and employee voice via affective commitment, such that the mediation was stronger for people lower, rather than higher, in Chinese traditionality.

Testing the moderated mediation model helps to advance our theoretical understanding of the psychological mechanisms that underlie the effect of RLMX on employees’ behaviour.

This empirical study provides preliminary evidence of the mediating role of affective commitment in the positive relationship between RLMX and employee voice. Our moderated mediation model also extends the existing finding by adding substantive moderators (Chinese traditionality) to explain how the effect of RLMX on employees’ behaviours unfolds.

Utilizing a paradox perspective, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the leadership-followership dynamic in foreign firms in China, specifically, the extent to which Yin-Yang leadership behaviors of Japanese expatriates and cosmopolitanism of Chinese employees influence employee commitment.

Data were collected through an online survey of Chinese employees who directly report to a Japanese supervisor in a Japanese subsidiary in China. Based on responses from 97 Chinese employees in three Japanese subsidiaries in China, the authors test if their cosmopolitan orientation and perceived Yin-Yang leadership behaviors of Japanese supervisors are related to employee commitment.

Yin-Yang leadership and cosmopolitan followership have a positive effect on employee commitment. Further, cosmopolitanism moderates the link between Yin-Yang leadership and employee commitment such that the follower’s cosmopolitanism compensates for lower levels of Yin-Yang leadership, especially a relative lack of Yin leadership behaviors.

Results suggest that Yin-Yang leadership and cosmopolitan followership work together as a two-way street of cultural adaptability to build employee commitment, highlighting the interplay between leadership and followership in multinational enterprises. Future research should attempt to further refine the Yin-Yang leadership construct, and to gain a larger sample representing multiple expatriate nationalities to corroborate the relationships found in this study.

The study applies a context-based approach to developing culturally relevant leadership, through analyzing both the emic and etic concepts of culture in China. In doing so, the authors extend the application of paradox theories to the cross-cultural leadership literature utilizing the Yin-Yang principle, which is particularly relevant in societal contexts where rapid and dramatic change brings to the fore competing values, needs and employee preferences.

Using Hofstede’s cultural value model, the purpose of this paper is to investigate how Chinese employees’ cultural values differ according to firm ownership type such as state-, privately, and US-owned firms.

Data were collected from 367 Chinese employees working at firms located in Beijing.

Results showed that while Chinese employees in state-owned firms scored the highest in collectivism, those working at privately and US-owned firms scored higher for individualism. The score for long-term orientation was also higher in state-owned firms than in privately and US-owned firms. However, contrary to the expectation, the scores for Chinese employees for power distance in state-owned firms were lower than in the others, while the scores for masculinity in state-owned firms were higher than for the others. Chinese employees in all three types of firms showed lower scores than reported in previous studies for uncertainty avoidance.

This study contributes to a deepened understanding of how the cultural values of Chinese employees differ depending on firms’ ownership types, with significant implications for managers, who do business in China as they seek to establish management practices more closely aligned with the cultural values of Chinese employees.

This study may be the first attempt to examine how Chinese cultural values differ according to various ownership types. It suggests that Chinese employees at privately and US-owned firms have different cultural values from employees at state-owned firms, even though all three groups of employees are Chinese.

The purpose of this paper was to develop an indigenous understanding of work-family interface (WFI) that reflects the drastic changes and evolving social context in China over the past three decades and challenge the existing conceptualizations of WFI and identify societal impact of the changing nature of the WFI.

We conducted literature review, content and thematic analyses.

The core idea of prioritizing work for family (PWF) is that Chinese employees, especially Chinese male employees, tend to integrate work and family roles as well as deal with WFI issues at the family level. Thus, Chinese employees can be strongly committed to the family while simultaneously prioritizing work performance.

The proposed indigenous perspective of PWF may furnish a contextualized theory for future research. The proposed measurement approaches may help developing indigenous scales for the perspective of PWF for future empirical studies.

Although Chinese employees tend to be more tolerant of work-family conflict (WFC) than their Western counterparts, such tolerance may be combined with the expectation of long-term returns to their families. Managers may assist employees with career planning and realistic goal setting to compensate for their endurance of WFC.

As a cornerstone of the society, the family plays an important role in building a “harmonious society” promoted by the government. A perceived balance of work and family is a significant factor for family harmony. We bring to the attention of policy makers the changing nature of the Chinese employees' WFI. A corresponding policy may be formulated to help Chinese employees balance their lives.

We challenge the existing conceptualizations of WFI by proposing and elaborating a perspective of PWF for context-based conceptualization.

China is a fast‐growing economy, and many multinational companies (MNCs) have found their ways to infiltrate that market. The competition among the MNCs has generated human resource management (HRM) problems. When formulating approaches in dealing with these problems, the expatriate management of the MNCs often “speak for” their local employees, as if the latter has no voice of its own. It is suspected that MNCs know partly what their local employees value. With such limited understanding, the former may be ineffective in managing their local staff. The purpose of this paper is to report a study that explores the HRM problems from local employees' perspectives. To understand Chinese employees, the conceptual lens, stemmed from Chinese philosophical traditions instead of that derived from western experience, is used.

Data were collected through semi‐structured interviews with Chinese employees working in MNCs.

The findings suggest that “asymmetrical understanding” exists between expatriate managers and their Chinese employees, and that the former may know much less about the latter than it is normally assumed.

The findings, illustrated through interviews, have shed light on how MNCs could manage their Chinese employees, and how a meaningful dialogue could take place: understanding the other (Chinese employees) on their own intellectual ground to overcome “asymmetrical understanding”.

By allowing the voice of the other to come forth rather than to keep it in the background as, at best, a whisper, the study helps create a platform for a meaningful cross‐cultural dialogue between voices from the west and the other.

The purpose of this paper is to examine a Chinese indigenous concept of organizational ownership behavior (OOB) as an aspect of employee suzhi in relation to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the Western context.

A content analysis based on a review of related research in Western mainstream and Chinese domestic literature is conducted.

Suzhi at the organizational level can be linked to the construct of OCB. In Chinese organizations, a relevant concept to OCB can be better understood as OOB to capture the sociopolitical and cultural context unique to Chinese organizations. The dimensional structure of OOB is presented to differentiate it from OCB which is popular in the Western context.

The identified construct of OOB offers important implications for indigenous Chinese management research and human resources management (HRM) practice. OOB, based on Chinese management practice, can better conform to China’s unique historical and cultural context and management practices. This concept varies distinctively from Western OCB in terms of its connotation and dimensions.

The concept of OOB as an indigenous employee organizational behavior in the Chinese context is conceptualized. The paper differentiates the OOB construct from OCB and presents an initial set of six dimensions of OOB for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model describing psychological states and behavioral outcomes experienced and exhibited by older generation interpersonal helping behavior (IHB) recipients in Chinese organizations.

The paper draws upon relevant literature and develops a theoretical model.

The analysis suggests that the extent of IHB that older generation Chinese employees receive from younger generation employees will lead to loss of mianzi, which will then result in reduced perceived generational guanxi, increased intended social isolation, and reduced intention to share task-related knowledge with the younger generation employees. The paper also proposes that perceived generational guanxi and intended social isolation will mediate the relationship between loss of mianzi and intention to share task-related knowledge with younger generation employees.

Because mianzi is an important cultural feature in Chinese societies, this paper provides four implications. First, younger generation employees could preserve and/or enhance older generation employees’ mianzi using less powerful messages. Second, younger generation employees should initiate task behaviors involving seeking opinions and expertise from older generation employees before exhibiting IHB. Third, mangers could reduce the negative impact of generational differences by establishing generational mentoring relationships between younger and older generation employees. Finally, younger generation employees could preserve and/or enhance older generation employees’ mianzi by playing the role of an informal subordinate rather than a problem solver when exhibiting IHB.

This paper is the first study exploring consequences of IHB from the perceptive of older generation IHB recipients in the Chinese context.

As the global presence of Chinese firms grows, increasing numbers of Chinese managers are working abroad as expatriates. However, little attention has been paid to such Chinese expatriate managers and their leadership challenges in an inter-cultural context, especially across a large cultural distance. To fill the gap in the literature concerning the leadership challenges for expatriate managers in an inter-cultural context, the purpose of this paper is to elucidate the leadership styles of Chinese expatriate managers from the perspectives of three traditional Chinese philosophies (i.e. Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism) in the inter-cultural context of the Netherlands.

The data for this qualitative study were collected via semi-structured, open-ended, narrative interviews with 30 Chinese expatriate managers in the Netherlands.

The results clearly show that the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is deeply rooted in the three traditional Chinese philosophies of Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism, even in an inter-cultural context. Specifically, the study reveals two salient aspects of how Chinese expatriate managers frame and interact with a foreign cultural context from the perspectives of traditional Chinese philosophies. First, the Chinese expatriate managers reported an initial cultural shock related to frictions between the foreign cultural context and Confucianism or Taoism, but less so in the case of Legalism. Second, the Chinese expatriate managers also reported that their interactions with the Dutch culture are best described as a balance between partial conflict and partial complementarity (thus, a duality). In this sense, the leadership style of Chinese expatriate managers is influenced jointly by the three traditional Chinese philosophies and certain elements of the foreign cultural context. This is consistent with the Chinese perspective of yin-yang balancing.

This study is among the first to offer a more nuanced and highly contextualized understanding of leadership in the unique case of expatriate managers from an emerging market (e.g. China) in an advanced economy (e.g. the Netherlands). The authors call for more research to apply the unique perspective of yin-yang balancing in an inter-cultural context. The authors posit that this approach represents the most salient implication of this study. For practical implications, the authors argue that expatriate leaders should carefully manage the interplay between their deep-rooted home-country philosophies and their salient host-country culture. Reflecting on traditional philosophies in another culture can facilitate inter-cultural leadership training for Chinese expatriates.

The overall goal of this chapter is twofold. First, the authors aim to identify indigenous phenomena that influence employee turnover and retention in the Chinese context. Second, the authors link these phenomena to the contextualization of job embeddedness theory. To achieve the goal, the authors begin by introducing three macro-level forces (i.e., political, economic, and cultural forces) in China that help scholars analyze contextual issues in turnover studies. The authors then provide findings in the literature research on employee retention studies published in Chinese academic journals. Next, the authors discuss six indigenous phenomena (i.e., hukou, community in China, migrant workers, state-owned companies, family benefit prioritization, and guanxi) under the three macro-level forces and offer exploratory propositions illustrating how these phenomena contribute to understanding employee retention in China. Finally, the authors offer suggestions on how contextualized turnover studies shall be conducted in China.