During The Transition Period Of China Business Management Thinking Evolution

This article following the threads of timeline, people and events combs up both domestic and foreign management activities, experiences and theories within specific periods. The author holds that management thoughts in China's economic transition have been evolving gradually. During the imitative period, namely from the end of 1970's to the early 1980's, Taylor's management thoughts, based on the hypothesis of economic man were applied to improve management performance; From the middle of 1980's to 1990's, McGregor's X theory and Y theory based on the hypothesis of complicated man got popular in China; In the new century, China's entry to WTO, the deepening of opening and reform and the coming new economic era have contributed to China's keeping up with the mature market economies in management thoughts, which is symbolized by the prevailing of the ideas based on culture man hypothesis. On the other hand, more and more attention is paid to Chinese-style management and the value of China's traditional culture on management, which urge us to further reflect on our management ideas. It has been widely accepted that the essence of China's traditional culture and management ideas combined with the rationality, preciseness and quantitative methods of western management theories will guide the future development of China's enterprises.This article originally comes up with a meaningful theme on the evolvement of the management thoughts in China's economic transition, which has never been systematically covered before by other literatures focusing either on the history of western management thoughts or China's ancient and modern management thoughts. But our research is still constructed on the impact that western management thoughts founded on human nature have on the evolvement of China's management thoughts. Case study is provided to support the main conclusions of the article.