An Empirical Study To The Influence Of Chinese And Korean Culture Difference On Organization Trust In China

With the growing interdependence of the world economy, the organizational landscape is increasingly populated by firms that own and control activities in more than one country. Such multinational corporations(MNCs) have received considerable attention in the fields of economics and strategic management, but have less frequently been the focus of study in human resource management(HRM). There has been an increase in research into MNCs behavior in China market. An active area of debate for scholars is the extent to which a local unit adheres to the HRM practices of the MNC or those of local firms.Recently large-size companies of China intend to go abroad for business, without enough studying on potential China MNCs. This research will explain their problems of the post-invested management, seeking adept matter-solving methods to possible culture conflicts by benchmarking MNC behaviors in abroad market.Eight Korean groups in China were investigated, which are distributed in three core economic zones of Bohai area, Shandong area, and Yangzi delta, collecting back 300 effective questionnaires. The investigation lasted 3 months, from March to May, 2006.This survey focuses on human resource management(HRM) and organization trust of MNCs in China, especially Korean companies. Under the cross-culture background, HRM is more complicated than in one country. This empirical research shows us four basic solutions that how national culture affects internal and external trust of organizations; whether the five HRM behaviors are the same or not at global and local level; which HRM strategy of the 3 ones are selected by MNCs in host countries; and what`s difference between having a regional Head-Quarter(HQ) and without it. The three crucial results are as following:Firstly, China and Korea are higher in the collectivism index(CI) and power distance index(PD), which were two of the five dimensions put forward by Hofstede. The result was proved that two high dimensions in the country are shallow correlations with organizational trust. That means CI and PD affect trust to some extent, but not strong enough. In the two national dimensions, CI is more influencial on internal trust than PD.Secondly, in the global integration(GI) and local responsiveness(LR) framework, HRM will be divided into three strategies, that is acceptable, integrative and transformative strategy. Acceptable strategy is low global and high local, integrative is high global and high local, and transformative is high global and low local. Sample number is the biggest in acceptable strategy, integrative and transformative ones are the second and third, respectively.Thirdly, the regional HQ controls HRM policies and is imposed to a set of routines in recruitment, training, performance appraisal, economic compensation and promot ion recently. So subsidiary companies in the regional HQ do more globalization than those without that in HRM. But the hypothesis that companies without the regional HQ do more localization in HRM, is not supported.In addition to proving the hypothesis, the relationship between nationality and trust is paid much attention. Internal trust is higher than external trust in Chinese managers, which means the guanxi(personal network) plays a key role in China.