Throughout the 20th century, many East Asian societies imported and transplanted the institutional foundations for industrialization and market economies, which has provided for substantial advances in material well-being. However, Confucianism, the predominant basis of traditional Chinese morality since antiquity, has begun staging a comeback in the recent years. Yet it is unclear as to how modern Confucian firms in a market economy will be organized, or how this will affect firm competitiveness. To shed further light on these issues, we examine the extant literature and identify several characteristics associated with Confucian business practice along with their potential impact on firm performance. We illustrate each of these characteristics with a company that explicitly follows Confucian business practice—Taiwan-based Sinyi Real Estate. It is found that, in general, Sinyi Real Estate conforms to the description of Confucian-based business practice that is expounded in the extant literature. However, there are a few surprises.

The extant research on high performance work practices (HPWPs) mainly focuses on the organization level, with little research exploring employee experienced HPWPs and their impact on individual work outcomes. Whether and how employee experienced HPWPs contribute to individual job performance is investigated in this study, using three waves of data from 318 subordinatesupervisor dyads in three big auto manufacturing companies in China. Results show that HPWPs are positively related to individual job performance. Moreover, this relationship is fully mediated by employee person-job fit and intrinsic motivation.

Through literature review and induction from management practices, this paper firstly identifies four subtypes of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), namely altruistic OCB based on personality, responsible OCB based on reciprocity, instrumental OCB based on self-interest, and compulsory OCB based on stress. The four OCB subtypes constitute an OCB continuum in the order of an individual’s degree of voluntariness. Both the positive and negative impacts of the four OCB subtypes on organizations and individuals are analyzed. Conclusions, limitations and future research directions are presented.

This study examines the antecedents and consequences of both timing and content of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals) for attracting and retaining valuable employees. A resource exchange frame theorizes the influence pattern of personal individualism value, social skill, and perceived insider status on i-deals timing. Individualism and social skill are expected to relate to both ex ante and ex post i-deals; perceived insider status is anticipated to relate only to ex post i-deals. The frame also suggests that i-deals’ content and personal development relate primarily to relational and balanced psychological contracts; the other ex post i-deals, flexibility and workload reduction relate to transactional psychological contracts. The frame was tested with data collected from 289 Chinese employees in the telecommunication industry.

Nutrition labeling has been accepted by Chinese consumers as an information source to learn about food quality and safety. This paper uses Chinese consumers’ rice purchase as an example to study how consumers use food nutrition labels to make purchase decision of a familiar food product. The goal is to understand how consumers seek information from the labels to make purchase when extensive experience with the food has been developed. Survey data from 400 random respondents in Beijing were analyzed using an empirical framework and a Mont Carlo integral econometrics model. We find that more than 50% of the consumers in Beijing have heard of food nutrition labels in general, 36.50% carefully use label information even if they are familiar with the food, and nearly 70% consider mandatory food nutrition labels as beneficial. Those who are more knowledgeable about rice nutrition labels are more likely to use the labels when purchasing rice, no matter how familiar they are with the product. Frequent users of nutrition labels are more likely to consider food mandatory nutrition labels as beneficial. This study suggests that consumers still use the label information to reassure the quality and safety of food despite a history of consumption.

Based on data from car dealers in China, this study examines the impacts of perceived organizational support (POS) and guanxi on personal performance and the mediating role of customer need knowledge (CNK). Results indicate that salespersons’ POS and guanxi with customers have a positively influence on their CNK and job performance; their CNK is also positively related to job performance. Meanwhile, CNK acts as a full mediator between salespersons’ POS and their job performance, and as a partial mediator between salespersons’ guanxi with clients and their job performance.

What is the relationship between Chinese familism and the modern economic organization? Can a rational, contractual relationship grow out of Chinese familism that widely exists in Chinese family businesses? This paper holds that Chinese familism can nurture a rational and contractual relationship. However, such a relationship is not an extremely instrumental rationality of Logocentrism, but a zhongyong rationality characteristic of Confucian culture essence. This paper verifies empirically for the first time the existence of zhongyong rationality by analyzing family entrepreneurs’ governance choices. The results reveal that under the guidance of zhongyong rationality, entrepreneurs in Chinese family firms lay more emphasis on restraints than on efficiency, balance the interests among the management, the firm and the owning family, and maintain equilibrium between the insiders and outsiders. This research also finds that a shift from instrumental rationality to zhongyong rationality can provide more satisfactory and indigenous explanations to some phenomena widely in existence among Chinese family firms, as compared with corresponding Western theories.

The transformation of China into an innovation-oriented nation is now topping the agenda of Chinese government. Technological innovation is seen at the heart of this transformation, and enterprises have been called the key driving force of the innovation process. However, what are the key ingredients for such a transformation to occur? And are Chinese enterprises ready to fulfil this new responsibility? Drawing on the concept of technological entrepreneurship, this paper intends to explain technological innovation in Chinese enterprises, and attempts to develop an integrative view for research in this field, especially as related to the questions asked above.