PurposeWhy are Chinese negotiators, contrary to theoretical expectations, often competitive? Classical negotiation theories grounded in culturally etic and Western-centric assumptions are unable to address this puzzle. This research aims to adopt a culturally emic and psycholinguistic perspective to investigate whether and how two semantically equivalent Chinese labels for negotiation - tanpan ((sic)(sic)) and xieshang ((sic)(sic)) - shape Chinese negotiators' competitiveness.Design/methodology/approachThe authors first conduct a pilot study to establish that tanpan and xieshang are semantically equivalent and represent the most common Chinese translations of the English word negotiation. The authors then conduct four multi-method studies to examine whether and how tanpan - compared with xieshang - elicits stronger competitiveness among Chinese negotiators in their perceptions and behaviors.FindingsThe label tanpan elicits stronger competitiveness than xieshang for Chinese individuals, in terms of their mental association (Study 1), normative strategy (Study 2), anger expression (Study 3) and news semantic orientation (Study 4). In addition, the tanpan vs xieshang labeling effect is mediated by negotiators' planned strategies (Study 3), indicating that it reflects a deliberate cognitive process beyond an automatic heuristic response.Originality/valueThis research offers a novel explanation for the puzzle of competitive Chinese negotiators by highlighting the influence of semantic framing in shaping negotiation dynamics. It also acknowledges that language functions as both a bridge and a barrier in negotiation contexts, providing actionable guidance for practitioners facing Chinese negotiation counterparts.

Companies adopt various HRM practices to enhance employees' abilities, motivations, and opportunities to foster innovation. Are these practices universally effective or culturally contingent? In this study, we draw on the Ability-Motivation-Opportunity (AMO) model and examine the effectiveness of three representative practices using a dataset of 304 companies from 13 countries or regions. We find that HRM practices need to fit in a supplementary/complementary way with national cultures to facilitate firm innovation: 1. cross-functional training (i.e., an ability-enhancing practice) is more effective in collectivistic rather than individualistic cultures (supplementary fit); 2. financial rewards for innovation (i.e., a motivation-enhancing practice) are more effective in masculine rather than feminine cultures (supplementary fit); and 3. employee participation (i.e., an opportunity-enhancing practice) is more effective in high rather than low power distance cultures (complementary fit). By building on the notion of supplementary/complementary fit, these findings extend our knowledge of the AMO model in the context of HRM and innovation management with a cultural contingency perspective.

Land constitutes a fundamental natural asset, vital for the sustenance, advancement, and ecological balance of human civilization [...]

In recent years, China's rural areas have undergone intense restructuring motivated by various flows derived from e-commerce, which has triggered a new wave of rural rejuvenation. Attempting to reveal the process and mechanism of rural economic restructuring driven by e-commerce, this paper takes Xiaying village in central China to conduct an empirical study by introducing the theory of "space of flows" and applying the method of semi-structured interview. The results show that e-commerce has become a technical catalyst to the variation of industry structure, employment pattern and household economy. Xiaying village has performed a leap from traditional agriculture to commercial service and constructed a complete e-commerce oriented industry chain, which is distinguished from the traditional path of rural modernization adhering to the gradual evolution of the primary, secondary and tertiary industry in China. In response, the employment pattern is diversified and tends to be de-agriculturalization, thus providing an economic advancement opportunity for rural households. As a matter of fact, rural elites, technology innovation (e-commerce platform), resource endowments and government support all contributed greatly to this restructuring process. What distinguishes it from others is the strong mobility and exchange of urban and rural elements, which functions as the initial engine. Essentially, this transition can be considered as the impact of the network on the geographic space restructuring rural economy.

ABSTRACT Although many organizations encourage employees to voice, employees may be reluctant to voice directly because they are afraid that their supervisors will perceive it as challenging their face (i.e., the positive image or social value of an individual). Alternatively, employees could deliver improvements or express concerns to their supervisors using indirect and implicit approaches, which we refer to as ‘implicit voice delivery’. Applying face theory, we examine the antecedents and outcomes as well as two boundary conditions of implicit voice delivery in organizations with two studies. In Study 1, we define the construct and develop a measure of implicit voice delivery. In Study 2, we test our proposed model with supervisor-subordinate dyadic data from a time-lagged survey. Results demonstrate that concern for other people's face drives employees to express their voices implicitly and that this relationship is stronger when supervisors’ concern for their own face is high rather than low. In addition, implicit voice delivery is associated with supervisors’ favorable response in terms of voice endorsement. Furthermore, the effect on voice endorsement is stronger when the supervisor is more able to infer meaning from implicit messages. Theoretical contribution and managerial implications are discussed.

We address the micro foundations of international business research by examining negotiation beliefs as a parsimonious guide for international business negotiators. We conceptualise the construct of 'negotiation beliefs' as a negotiator's cognition about the nature of negotiation and effective negotiation strategies. We integrate the negotiation literature and empirically investigate the differences and similarities in the negotiation beliefs of Americans and the Chinese. Across two studies, we conduct a conceptual analysis of negotiation beliefs and develop measures for the culturally similar and culturally different factors of the negotiation beliefs of Chinese and American negotiators. We find that negotiation beliefs can predict negotiation outcomes. Our findings indicate that Americans and the Chinese share negotiation beliefs about cooperation and competition. They also understand negotiation using culturally different factors, namely hierarchy and relationship for the Chinese and economic interest and confrontation for the Americans. We further discuss the theoretical and practical implications for international negotiations, particularly regarding disputes between the US and China.

In the digital era, the application of new technology tools has reshaped the original work pattern, changed the way employees accomplish tasks and interpersonal communication, and provided sales employees with more autonomy. As a result, self-leadership has become increasingly important.To investigate the impact of self-leadership on employee turnover in the digital era and its mechanism, this paper uses both qualitative and quantitative methods based on the sample of sales employees. First, using structured interviews, we discover that sales employees’ self-leadership behaviors are empowered by digital platform and manifested in active information seeking and internal social network building. Second, based on the self-control theory and the job embeddedness theory, we propose a theoretical model with the sales performance as a mediator. Using the behavior records of sales employees from a digital platform, we employ the survival model and Monte Carlo methods to analyze the data and find that sales performance plays a mediating role in the relationship between self-leadership and turnover. That is, the more self-leadership behaviors of sales employees on the digital platforms, the higher their sales performance; and the higher their performance, the less likely they turnover.The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, this paper provides an in-depth understanding of the specific behaviors of successful self-lead sales employees in the digital era, and contributes to the scarce results on self-leadership in the Chinese context. Secondly, this paper enriches the research on the impact of self-leadership on employee turnover in the digital era. It expands the understanding of employee turnover by explaining the causes of turnover at the individual level from the perspective of self-leadership. Finally, this paper pioneers the use of objective employee behavior records from a mobile work platform as the data source for the empirical study, which is a very useful exploration. The findings also provide practical insights for sales performance and turnover management from the self-leadership perspective in the digital era.

基于共同体视角,在文献梳理的基础上重新厘定民营企业社会责任的概念内涵,探讨民营企业社会责任履行的相关机制.要使民营企业的社会责任行为更具可持续性,需要政府、市场和社会的共同努力:政府方面建立健全激励与监督机制,市场方面应聚焦自我提升与朋辈评价体系建设,社会方面应强化道德约束和舆论导向.三者相互协作,共同努力,才能形成多层次、多方位的全面监督体系,构建促进民营企业履行社会责任的共同体生态.

Purpose Job involvement is an important predictor of how well employees perform and feel at work. However, despite fruitful findings, little is known about how person–job (P–J) fit affects job involvement. Design/methodology/approach This study used a cross-sectional design and collected data from 375 employees and 50 managers. Multivariate regression was applied to test the moderated curvilinear model. Findings This study found an inverted U -shaped relationship between P–J fit and job involvement. For employees with a strong performance goal orientation, maximum job involvement occurred at a higher level of P–J fit, whereas for employees with a strong learning goal orientation, maximum job involvement occurred at a moderate level of P–J fit. Practical implications Managers should be aware that solely maximizing fit may not constantly yield positive outcomes, and that ignoring differences in employee needs and goals may be counterproductive. Originality/value The study challenges the conventional wisdom that a high P–J fit is always productive by showing that a high fit may sometimes jeopardize job involvement, particularly for certain employees.

Chinese management research aims to contribute to global management knowledge by offering rigorous and innovative theories and practical recommendations both for managing in China and outside. However, two seemingly opposite directions that researchers are taking could prove detrimental to the healthy development of Chinese management research. We argue that the two directions share a common ground that lies in the mindset regarding the confidence in the work on and from China. One direction of simply following the American mainstream on academic rigor demonstrates a lack of self-confidence, limiting theoretical innovation and practical relevance. Yet going in the other direction of overly indigenous research reflects over-confidence, often isolating the Chinese management research from the mainstream academia and at times, even becoming anti-science. A more integrated approach of conducting Chinese management research is recommended. Specifically, it is recommended that researchers can focus on phenomena salient in China and follow rigorous scientific methods, as illustrated by a few exemplary studies using the Chinese context. In this way, Chinese management research can advance if it becomes more self-confident in its study and application but not over-confident.

The paper studies how leaders can break employee silence. Drawing upon self-determination theory, we argue that empowering leadership can activate employees’ intrinsic motivation such that employees are more willing to break the silence at work; furthermore, the effect is stronger when employees have high (vis-à-vis low) levels of job autonomy. We collected time-lagged and multi-source data in a large company to test our hypotheses. The results show that intrinsic motivation mediates the relationship between empowering leadership and employee silence. That is, empowering leadership can reduce employee silence through enhancing their intrinsic motivation. Furthermore, this mediation effect will be stronger when employees have high levels of job autonomy. This paper contributes to the literature on leadership, employee silence, and job design characteristics.

We study how firms across different countries and regions deploy human capital for innovation. Based on survey data from 304 manufacturing firms across 13 economies, we find that both task-related training and employee participation improve firm innovation in terms of the commercial success of new product development and the percentage of firm revenue from newly developed products. More importantly, the effects of training on innovation are stronger when firms have a high (rather than low) centralization of authority and when firms are located in fast- (rather than slow-) growing economies; in contrast, the effects of employee participation remain the same across levels of firm centralization and rates of growth in the economy. Our findings contribute to the research on the deployment of human capital in an international context and offer practical implications for global managers.

Negotiation researchers have conducted a large number of experimental lab studies to identify the factors that affect negotiation outcomes, but it remains unclear whether those results can be generalized to real‐world negotiations. To explore this question, we analyzed the dynamic international iron ore annual negotiations that took place from 2005 to 2009. We found evidence that supports two important findings from previous experiments. Specifically, we focused on the impact of negotiators’ best alternatives and first offers on negotiation prices using multiple case study analysis. We found that iron ore prices increased more when the gap between the previous year's negotiated price and the price on the alternative spot market, a public market in which commodities are traded for immediate delivery, was larger, which suggested that buyers were sensitive to the strength of this alternative, supporting the literature on the role of alternatives. We also found that the first offer price significantly influenced the final price. Our findings extend two important experimental findings from the negotiation literature to large‐scale business negotiations in the real world.

Impression management has important implications for success at work. This study explores differences in impression management in the East and West by examining the use of self-promotion, ingratiation, and exemplification directed towards three targets: supervisors, peers, and subordinates among 945 company employees from Japan, Korea, and the United States. Our results show that Korean employees used all three strategies most frequently, followed by United States, and then Japanese employees. Japanese and Korean employees used impression management strategies differentially across the three targets, and U.S. employees used impression management equally across targets. This elucidates how cultural trends in hierarchical relationships impact social behavior within the workplace. A follow-up mediation analysis found that relational or labor mobility fully mediated country differences in impression management, suggesting that culture is also reflected in larger social ecological trends in employee's ability and likelihood to change jobs, which also account for impression management strategy usage. Theoretical and practical implications for international business are discussed. This research may be useful in aligning strategies foreign employees might employ for using impression management when in Japan, Korea, and the United States.

Drawing upon various theoretical perspectives, we examine employee harmonious passion as a mechanism linking leader creative behavior and employee creativity. We hypothesize that leader creative behavior promotes employee harmonious passion when the leader is humble. In contrast, when leaders are not humble, their creative behaviors can decrease employee harmonious passion. Moreover, we expect that employees who occupy brokerage positions in organizational advice networks are better able to convert their harmonious passion into creativity. Based on weekly repeated measures of 95 employees and their 31 supervisors for 6 consecutive weeks, our multilevel modeling results provide support to the hypotheses. These findings shed important light on the bright as well as the dark side of leader creative behavior and the critical role played by leader humility and social networks in promoting employee creativity.

In this paper, we argue that commitment-based human resource management (CHRM) enables firms to form an innovation strategy, enriching the literature focused on the subordinate role of HRM in a given strategy. In CHRM, employees are hired based on their knowledge, their expertise is developed, and they are empowered to take reasonable risks in the interest of long-term outcomes. These HRM policies, which mediated by innovative work practices, enable firms to realize their strategic intention to engage in innovation. Analyses of time-lagged data from 445 firms support our hypotheses, and implications are discussed.