Human Resource Management in China

Abstract

The concept of human resource management (HRM) in China was only adopted beginning in the 1990s as a foreign import. Many domestic firms still operate in a traditional personnel management mode with limited strategic planning or HR capability, although there is a general trend by which firms are increasingly becoming more strategic in their HRM. In state-owned firms, the HR department acts mainly as the implementer of HR policies formulated and imposed by the state (employer). In domestic private firms, HR managers often play the role of administrator, following instructions from the boss. Indeed, lack of professional management is often a criticism about Chinese family-owned businesses, in which the owners run the business and make all the decisions with little consultation of those who work for the firm. It is in the foreign-funded multinational corporations (MNCs) that HRM is considered to be most systematic and sophisticated, resembling that of Western practices. Chinese culture plays a fundamental role in the management of workplace relationships. Paternalism and collectivism are seen as distinctive cultural characteristics that influence the way people behave and are managed at work. However, work ethics and expectations have changed as China develops economically and has become more open to the influence of foreign cultures, aided by information communication technology, and as the majority of the younger generation of the Chinese urban workforce are the “only-child” of the family as a result of the one-child policy enforced by the government from 1980 until the 2010s to curb population growth. Young employees are more eager to succeed, less willing to endure hardship, more assertive of their rights and interests, and less loyal to their employers, as evidenced by the high level of staff turnover. Equally, employers have become more cost-oriented, in part to deal with heightened competitive pressures. This is in part reflected in the work intensity (measured by pressure at work and long working hours) and the growing use of nonstandard employment characterized by the absence of job security, reduced social security, and the lack of career development opportunities. As marketization deepens, wealth disparity increases, and workplace relationships become more transactional in nature, the relationship between labor and capital/management has worsened in many workplaces, leading to a rising level of labor disputes. The understanding of people management at workplaces, therefore, needs to be situated in the broader context of employment relations, including the respective role, power base, and level of bargaining power of key institutional actors such as the state, employers and employer associations, and workers and their representing bodies like the trade unions. It is with this objective in mind that this bibliography of HRM in China has been compiled, taking into account aspects of functional and strategic HRM at the firm level, organizational behavior (OB) at the individual level, and workplace relationships collectively, with relevance to HRM. This broadened approach to contemplating HRM is an attempt to address the growing imbalance in HRM research that has been heavily skewed toward quantitative studies of individual behavior at the expense of in-depth studies of actions and interactions of socials groups in specific organizational settings.