This paper examines factors associated with international franchising firms’ entry modes when they enter the Chinese market. To this end, a survey was conducted to investigate the linkage between entry modes and characteristics of franchising firms. The logit model and regression analysis were used to test the hypotheses. Findings reveal four factors that significantly influence international franchisors’ entry mode choices including cultural and geographic distance, international market experience, risk spreading, and maturity of the franchising system.

Drawing on the victim precipitation theory and self-esteem theory, this study examines the dispositional antecedents and consequences of workplace ostracism. Using data from 208 employees and their 96 immediate supervisors in two petroleum and gas companies in China, this study finds that agreeableness and extraversion are negatively, and neuroticism is positively related to workplace ostracism. Moreover, workplace ostracism is found to be negatively related to employee job performance, and this relationship is mediated by employee organization-based self-esteem.

This paper examines the effect of Confucian cultural value on the relationship between multimarket contact and two dimensions of firm performance, i.e., firms’ innovation and profitability. It is hypothesized that firms with a high level of multimarket contact are more likely to show mutual forbearance towards their competitors, which in turn influences their innovative behavior and financial performance. Taking into account the possible moderating effects of Confucian cultural value, we also hypothesize that the effect of multimarket contact is more pronounced among firms from the Confucian culture. In other words, it is argued that firms from the Confucian culture are more likely to innovate and obtain better financial performance. Empirical tests were conducted after the hypotheses, and the findings support the arguments on multimarket contacts and mutual forbearance hypotheses. Through facilitating tacit collusion, multimarket contact does seem to help create superior economic performance.

Recent years have witnessed a phenomenal growth in the number of Chinese enterprises “going global.” Drawing on three leading theoretical perspectives including the transaction cost theory, organizational capability theory and eclectic theory, this paper develops hypotheses to test how country risk and cultural distance are associated with entry mode choices of enterprises from China. Based on a sample of 167 Chinese companies, an empirical investigation has been conducted employing logistic regression and hierarchical regression analyses. Our results show that country risk and cultural distance have significant impact on entry mode choice. With the increase of country risk or cultural distance, businesses prefer non-ownership-based entry modes such as trade and licensing. However, entry mode choice is also noticeably influenced by the interaction between country risk and cultural distance, which is a new finding of international entry mode research. Furthermore, private enterprises are more likely to adopt high-involvement entry mode than the state-owned enterprises, and service enterprises are less likely to use high-involvement entry mode, which suggests that different approaches are used to deal with country risk and cultural distance by various types of enterprises.

This study examines the relationship among family supportive culture, organizational attachment, and work-life segmentation in high-tech service industry in Taiwan, China. Using survey data from 369 professionals, this study shows that family supportive culture has significant influence on organizational attachment, namely, affective commitment. Results indicate that individuals’ work-life segmentation has a significant negative effect on organizational attachment. Meanwhile, our results further apply employees’ segmentation between work and life as a moderator to investigating the impact of individual’s perceptions of family supportive culture and values on a sense of attachment toward organizations. The result illustrates that work-life segmentation does not moderate the relationship between supportive family culture and employees’ organizational attachment. Findings from this research provide insights into the influence of organizational family supportive culture and how it may further encourage employees’ organizational attachment in high-tech industry in Taiwan.

Extending the research on work–family interface in the Chinese context, the present study examines how organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) may enrich the quality of OCB performers’ family life through personal learning. Results from a sample of 385 supervisor-subordinate dyads in China show that OCB is positively associated with work-to-family enrichment. This association is fully mediated by one type of personal learning, namely personal skill development. The findings are discussed with respect to their theoretical contributions and practical implications in Chinese contexts.

Social network analysis is a highly useful tool to study the way individuals form alliances to cope with their daily tasks on the micro-level. We can map the interaction between the key persons involved into a graph, representing the social network. The result is then a snapshot of who interacts with whom and why/how at the time the data were collected. However, when trying to apply it to a higher level, real life problems, this method of analysis seems to deviate from the way people form networks of relationships in social practice. In social practice, human actors tend to form relationships on the basis of institutional affiliation and inclusion in social groups. This paper intends to use Social Integration (SI) developed at Erasmus University Rotterdam on the basis of Karl Weick’s organization theory to enrich current social network theory with a module that links networks on the basis of multiple inclusions of actors in several social-cognitive groups (networks). The expanded model is tested on a Chinese business case.

Using a unique dataset from Shanghai Stock Exchange, we study institutional trading behaviors in IPOs and post-IPOs. From the perspective of value-based or speculation, we find that, (1) institutional investors are flippers on the first day of IPOs, (2) trading by institutional investors and the active institutional investors (mutual funds or brokerage) is value-based, and (3) the net buys of institutional investors can predict the long term performance of IPO-firms and shows a negative relation with a bubble in future. Since individual investors are the opponent of institutional investors, our results mean that individuals are speculators in the market. Our study suggest that institutional investors are the sophisticated ones in the market and they can process information more efficiently, whose value-based trading can enhance market price discovery and is good for market stabilization.