A dualistic view of employment in China

Qin

et al. 2020

Asia Pac J Human Res

The current significant change from traditional to hybrid employment arrangements may contribute to counterproductive work behaviour by workers of differing employment status. However, limited efforts have been made to solve the problem. In this study, we utilise a psychological contract lens to develop a counterproductive work behaviour model in hybrid employment that includes pay satisfaction and job security. We use 215 dyads of workers and supervisors from a Chinese state-owned airline company. Our findings show that employment status can elicit workers' counterproductive work behaviour, and pay satisfaction and job security serve as chain mediators that link differential human resource management behind employment status to counterproductive work behaviour. We contribute to the knowledge of employee behaviour under hybrid employment by exploring the differences through a psychological mechanism. This work provides practical implications for organisations to develop appropriate motivating practices.

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confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Employment status and counterproductive work behaviour: a chain mediating effect in the Chinese context

Qin

et al. 2020

Asia Pac J Human Res

“…Chinese workers with different employment arrangements, resulting from the employment informalization, may have very different employment experiences among themselves (cf., Gallagher, Lee & Kuruvilla, 2011). The negligence of the contextual complexity of Chinese employment relationships may result in some simplistic understanding of Chinese workers, leading to the understudied employment phenomena in China and the underrepresented employment experiences of Chinese workers (Ma, 2018). In Hornung and Rousseau's (2012, p326) words, the 'understanding of Chinese workers regarding traditional and emerging employment arrangements' have been insofar 'taken-for-granted'.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedding Chinese Atypical Workers in the Indigenous ‘Unequal Pay for Equal Work’: Introduction and Implications

Ma¹,

Yong²

2019

theijbm

Self Cite

The employment relationships in the Chinese context have attracted growing scholarly interests and research efforts. The efforts to understand the complexity of the Chinese employment and Chinese employees' experiences at work have led to several recent special issues in some privileged journals in the field of management and organization behaviour (e.g., Human Relations, 2015; Journal of Organizational Behavior, 2015). In this paper, we introduce an indigenous definition of atypical workers in China, inspired by an overlooked Chinese employment phenomenon, recently brought into the English literature by Ma (2018), wherein workplace inequality is implicit in the employment relationship. Unfair workplace practices in China are often referred to as 'unequal pay for equal work' (同工不同酬) between certain groups of workers involving particularly non-permanent workers by Chinese scholars (e.g., Wang, 2012; Xu, Zeng & Ji, 2013; Zhang, 2013). It is an upshot of unequal social life resulting from structural implications (for overviews, see Peng, 2009; also see Burns, 1977). For the purpose of this paper, we will focus on an organizational manifestation of this social inequality at workplace between workers in a single organisation. It began by a brief history of transformations in the Chinese labour laws and industrial relations and moved on to compare and contrast the use of alternative employment arrangements in the West and China, leading to an analysis of the inevitable workplace unfairness between certain groups of Chinese workers and the nature of the injustice. We conclude with discussion of the implications for the theories and research. 2. Chinese Labour Law and the Employment Transformation Before 1978, labour policies were under a command system (see Zhou, 1955). Lifetime employment was mandatory (Si, Wei & Li, 2008) thus 'contract-free', i.e., the 'Iron Rice Bowl' (Wang, 2008). Under the 'Iron Rice Bowl' system, workers were employed by state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and collectively owned enterprises with guaranteed permanent employments and the cradle-to-grave benefit system, including wage, welfare provision, and job security. Under this socialism employment relationship started from 1950s, 'companies' (公司) rarely existed, in whose place has been 'unit' (单位) whereby employees have been administered by centrally planned wages ('Iron Wage') and state-controlled job appointments and promotions ('Iron Chair') (i.e., the 'Old Three Iron', see Bray, 2005). The idea of 'dual-system' (双轨制), i.e., a duality of centralised planning supplemented by contracts, was proposed and trialed by the then Vice-President Liu Shaoqi in 1956 (see Chong, 1958); but it was only promoted by the Ministry of Labour in 1983 (Notice on Actively Promoting Labour Contracts, 1983). By then, only 650,000 workers were on employment contracts; a year later, the number increased to 40 million (Liu & Lu, 1996). In 1986, the Temporary Regulations on the Labour Contract was trialed and, in 1994, passed as the National Labour Law. A year later, this ...

Journal of Management & Organization

“… 2 The translations of ‘promise’ and ‘obligation’ used in this study were ‘chengnuo’ (‘承诺’) and ‘yiwu’ (‘义务’), respectively, based on the PCI used by Hui, Lee, & Rousseau (2004) who first claimed generalizability of the psychological contract in China (for a critical discussion, see Ma, 2018). …”

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Same words, different worlds: Exploring differences in researcher and participant understandings of promise and obligation in the psychological contract

Blenkinsopp

Armstrong

2018

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This paper addresses longstanding questions about how promise and obligation, two of the key conceptual building blocks for psychological contract research, are conceptualized and operationalized (see Conway & Briner, 2005;Rousseau, 2011;Bankins, 2014):How do employees understand these concepts? Would their understandings be congruent with the researchers' and how would this knowledge inform future psychological contract research? Drawing on interviews with 61 Chinese workers from diverse backgrounds, our results suggest the concepts have distinct meanings for participants in terms of three criteria (defining characteristics, key features, and manifestations in employment). We argue that promise and obligation are likely to serve different functions in employment relationship, and have different meanings for researchers versus participants, and accordingly we highlight the challenges of using them to conceptualize and operationalize psychological contracts in China and beyond.