Predictors of employees’ strike attitudes in multinational corporations in China: a multilevel relational model

Abstract

China experienced an unprecedented increase in labor strikes until the mid-2010s, and the country continues to experience considerable strike activity. Therefore, it is important to study what predicts Chinese workers’ attitudes toward strikes. The study applies social exchange theory as an overarching framework to investigate the contributions of three forms of social exchange relations in organizations—employee-employer relations, labor-management relations, and leader-member relations—to account for Chinese employees’ attitudes toward strikes in multinational corporations (MNCs) based in China. Using a matched employee-employer sample of more than 1,600 employees in 41 China-based MNCs, the results obtained from hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis show that individual-perceived employee-employer relations indicated by a negative reciprocity norm is positively related to employees’ strike attitudes. Labor-management relations indicated by the organizational-level cooperative industrial relations (IR) climate is negatively related to employees’ strike attitudes. Leader-member relations indicated by leader-member exchange (LMX) is not significantly related to employees’ strike attitudes. Overall, the results indicate that at the individual level, it is more important for companies not to do bad (to engage in negative reciprocity with workers) than to do good to reduce employees’ strike attitudes.