What does the ‘inner world’ of Chinese managers tell us about their management values, thoughts and practices? An ethnographic study

Jose Weng-Chou Wong and Siew-Huat Kong

Asia Pacific Business Review, 2017, vol. 23, issue 5, 625-640

Abstract: This article aims to investigate an important implicit expectation held by many observers: the dramatic economic change presently occurring on mainland China would be accompanied by the transformation of Chinese managerial values, thoughts and practices. Using an ‘ethnographic’ approach, we seek to understand the forces that are currently shaping Chinese managerial values, thoughts and behaviours in some privately owned firms. A set of ten managerial assumptions at three levels – ‘self’, ‘managing’ and ‘organisation’ – are unveiled and we see how they function coherently in animating managerial behaviour with distinctive ‘Chinese characteristics’. The importance attached to ‘family’ when dealing with employees, the requirement to be as ‘flexible’ as possible in managerial behaviour and the compulsion to call for ‘harmony and stability’ indicate that our informants define good management in a unique way. Interestingly, after years of intense political, ideological campaigning, economic reforms and opening-up policies, a set of traditional Chinese values continues to shape their managerial behaviour.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13602381.2017.1283892 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:apbizr:v:23:y:2017:i:5:p:625-640

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/FAPB20

DOI: 10.1080/13602381.2017.1283892

Access Statistics for this article

Asia Pacific Business Review is currently edited by Professor Chris Rowley and Malcolm Warner

More articles in Asia Pacific Business Review from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().