Study on the Influence of Confucianism on Chinese Corporate Culture

Abstract

Confucianism has a history of thousands of years and plays a vital role in the development of corporate culture in East Asian countries. By collecting and summarizing the literature related to the theme of Confucianism and corporate culture”, we found six core ideas of Confucianism such as “benevolence”, “virtue”, “etiquette”, “intelligence”, “loyalty” and “peace”. Each of them plays a different degree of guiding role in modern Chinese enterprises. Based on the previous studies, this paper identifies 16 cultural elements in the six dimensions of Confucian culture. In order to study the influence of 16 Confucian cultural elements on business management, a questionnaire on the degree of mutual influence of 16 cultural elements was produced by Decision-making and Trial Evaluation Laboratory method, and a detailed questionnaire survey was conducted among 12 industry experts by Delphi method. Taking the Confucian cultural elements in Chinese corporate culture as research objects, the interaction status and causal logic relationship between each cultural element are analyzed, and the Effect Degree、Affected Degree、Cause Degree、Prominence Degree of each cultural element is affected. Based on the relationship between Confucian cultural elements and enterprise development, it is found that the characteristics of Chinese modern corporate culture are as follows:1.People-oriented. People are the most precious. Only by creating good living conditions and working environment can it fully mobilize the potential of the employees; 2.Govern by virtue and righteousness. Giving consideration to both righteousness and profits, and the enterprise should be beneficial to the society while pursuing the benefits as the profits come from the righteousness; 3.The inner saint and outer king. When the “inner saint and outer king” is applied in the construction of enterprise culture, which requires employees to constantly learn and enrich their inner nature, that is, self-cultivation. Therefore, improving employees’ life wisdom and paying attention to the growth of employees’ personality are also what the enterprise managers should pay attention to. The lack of integrity in China’s modern corporate culture lies in: 1. Lack of integrity. Enterprise often make promises to internal employees and customers without paying attention to implementation;2. The weak institutionalization of enterprises. The management system of excellent enterprise culture is necessarily the embodiment of science, standardization and rational management;3. Violation of sustainable development. With the development of Chinese extensive economy in the past few years, the ecological environment in our country has been seriously damaged and polluted.