In considering China’s management, researchers are trying to depict core parts of Chinese managerial characteristics from multiple perspectives, such as the cultural impact in the context of MNCs’ HRM issues. Gamble (2000) found, from his survey of Japanese, Korean, Hong Kong and European ventures in China, that localizing management in China was inhibited due to ‘practical, cultural and strategic factors’: thus, his research suggests that culturally literate expatriates or qualified local managers are vital to MNCs. When discussing the cultural impacts, Gamble argued that there were five factors intervening in management: firstly, the cultural stereotypes from headquarters (for example, Japanese MNCs were reluctant to localize the management role in consideration of local managers’ loyalty to the company, organizational skills, and attention to quality); secondly, insider/outsider dichotomies, borders in variable fixity and porosity of boundaries in Chinese definitions of their relationship with people; thirdly, the guanxi factor, a much-debated topic in the structure of Chinese personnel networks; fourthly, modernity and prestige, a special issue reflecting the complexity of the Chinese attitude towards foreign culture, in which expatriates can usually wield more leverage in doing business with their Chinese counterparts due to government and domestic prejudice regarding western achievements; fifthly, the expatriate as ‘mother’s brother’, with a special Chinese personnel relationship being granted to expatriates in which outsiders are treated as insiders of the group.
Another empirical study, conducted by Verburg et al. (1999), argued, after a comparative survey of 70 Chinese industry sections (40 state-owned enterprises and 57 joint-ventures) and 47 Dutch industrial enterprises, that there exist distinctive features in cognitional structure, cultural values and labour regulations. The research adopted Globe (Den Hartog,1997) culture scores from the Netherlands and China and defined key points in HRM practices, mainly in respect of personnel selection and placement, pay and rewards, performance appraisal and personnel training. The research found, by comparing HRM practices in two countries, that the distinction is big. The traditional Chinese culture and value perception has experienced a transition in the process of recent socio-economic changes and new labour laws.
Choi’s (2008) findings relating to East Asian-owned firms (EAIEs) in China categorise three forms of managerial style: regulative, authoritarian and paternalistic. In search of the reasons contributing to labour disputes, it suggests that various factors, mainly the organizational characteristics, the institutional arrangements, the working conditions, and the composition of the labour force and managerial style, lead to different forms of labour dispute. The research revealed that “labour disputes are significantly and differentially influenced by various crucial variables according to the national origin of the firms” (2008: 1953), and, except for the institutional and economic factors, the “cultural factors still exert a persistent effect on the labour disputes, concurrent with the salient variations in managerial styles among EAIEs” (2008: 1956). Unfortunately, the author did not scrutinize the cultural influence in this research.
As China is becoming one of the most dynamic and significant economies in the world, policies of HRM such as the hiring of local managers are being adopted by many MNCs. Li and Nesbit (2013) noted this phenomenon of cultural contradictions at the managerial level. When local managers are working in MNCs, how do Chinese traditional cultural values encounter the Western-based cultural values? Li and Nesbit selected some key points, first, to define the research area: the HRM cultural values of Chinese staff working in MNCs; second, to identify the significant differences of HRM values from both sides; third, an effective research method to approach the objective.
The Western-based HRM values, as the researcher has pointed out, were ‘Anglo-Saxonized’, as all the MNCs were sampled from the US and Europe, which can be categorized into three dimensions: fundamental orientation towards human resources, the hard approach and the soft approach. By searching the literature on Chinese culture and history, the author has been able to identify Chinese values associated with people management, which follow the three abovementioned dimensions (Li and Nesbit, 2013). The methodology adopted in this research is from George Kelly’s Repertory Grid Interview (RGT) approach (1955), which involves 455 bi-polar constructs obtained from seven elements, and 23 master constructs with definitions were finally concluded by interviewing 37 Chinese managers. The authors compared value differences under the same dimension, and found that there was a strong influence and assimilation of western values among Chinese managers, while, of course, some traditional Chinese values such as
personal relationships (guanxi) and group orientation were deeply imbedded into the managers’ minds, although others had disappeared, including the ‘harmony’ and ‘virtue’ concepts which were once the key values held in the Chinese tradition. Furthermore, 14 of 36 participants emphasized that coaching, mentoring and career planning are the key concerns in human resource management, which are closely connected with the personal networks of traditional Chinese values.
This research has some limitations, as the authors admitted that sample chosen was narrow, focusing only on 36 interviewees from just American and European MNCs, and not taking consideration of MNCs from other nationalities, which probably bring different values of perceptions for the managers. Nonetheless, it provides useful guidance for further research, as well as some hints that some Chinese management values may become integrated into a hybrid international HRM. The research method presented in this study offered an effective and validated method for research relating to HRM and industrial relations.
A research of automobile industry IR situation in China (Jurgens & Krzywdzinski,2014) found that there was extensive use of fixed-term contract for up to 10 years as a transitional phase before blue-collar workers get an unlimited contract. Temporary contract was a main contract-based employment, plus another type of temporary pattern was from labour agency which was as high as 28% of total work force (See Figure 5.1. ).
Figure 5.1. : Structure of blue-collar workforce by form of contract (in %) in automobile manufacturing plants
The research found that there were stable sources for blue-collar work force supply, unlike the lower levels of the value chain, mainly from the contract based vocational high school or vocational college. Few of migrant workers have been enrolled into the automobile industry. Even though, automobile industry took much more concern on the competence improvement of employees on the shop floor level. The competence required from auto firm comprised the factors not only in operational skills, such as multi-skilling for several workplaces with the team, preventive routine maintenance for tools and machine, knowledge of quality control, but also the skills relating to communicating with the team, supervisors and engineers. The later demands were actually the competence of cross-cultural communications.
A qualitative empirical research in looking for host country language proficiency of MNCs expatriates has presented evidence on the importance of corporate language strategy (Zhang & Peltokorpi, 2016). There was a large number of expatriates working in China's MNCs or FDI which was estimated to be 220,000 in 2012 (Global Economics, 2012), and researchers interviewed 70 expatriates and their host country national (HCN) guided by the social identity theory. The study was trying to find out the impact of host country language proficiency on work and non-work-related adjustment.
The 70 interviewees come from 13 Nordic subsidiaries in the Beijing and Shanghai areas in 2006 - 2007 and 2012 - 2013. It has been argued that language proficiency took a positive influence on interaction adjustment in a study of expatriates in several host countries (Shaffer et al.,1999), which may cover various issues like coordination, communication, control, knowledge transfer, social identity and power and career advancement, this study has found out that expatriates host country language proficiency has multi-faceted effects on expatriates' performance with local employees, social support, and network related and non-work adjustment.
The industrial transition reforms after 2008 economic recession has also led to some changes of trade union election. According to the contents of Constitution of Labour Law, trade union must be built in the workplace, plus, there was an increasing workers' protests after 2006 (Chan,2010), the All China Federation of Trade Union (ACFTU) has
strengthened the trade union building in private and trans-national corporate. Apart from the old "top-down" state-driven, a trade union election manipulated by government and high level trade union, and TNCs-induced patterns, an echo of strong consumer movement in Western countries requiring for the corporate social responsibility, for the election of trade union at enterprises level, a new type of strike-driven union election has caused much attention by scholars and government (Hui & Chan,2015). Although critics saying it is hardly to be believed a new democratic trade unionism by this strike-driven election, just a kind of internal affairs, strong filtering mechanisms excluding rank-and-file workers from the higher levels of the union structure, it is, from the cultural perspective, compatible with China hierarchical and authoritarian social structure.
Researchers and practitioners recently are thinking of more HRM and IR into environmental management issues, which being called green competences (GCs). It is because that HRM is taken as an entity in supporting and promoting the adaptation of environment protection practices (Jabbour,2013;Renwick, Redman, & Maguire,2013). China was regarded as the world's most seriously polluted country (Tan & Lau,2010), thus, improving the individuals GCs from the employees working in the MNCs and FDI looks necessary and mandatory. A study of GCs in China (Subramanian, et al., 2016) industries in automotive manufacturing, raw material extraction, IT and other sectors proved that acquired GCs were driving force in shaping their effective GCs, even though there may exist different interpretations of harmonious development.