The Influence Of Guanxi And Face On The Attitude Of Workers Towards Reward Systems

The final decades of the twentieth century made globalization an irreversible trend. The process of globalization has stimulated China's adoption of Western practices. Individually based performance-related reward systems have been introduced to China at this time. It is based on the principle that employees should be rewarded according to their job performance. Individually based performance-related reward systems have been utilized for a long time in the major Western economies, and especially in countries that belong to the Anglo-Saxon cultural cluster that includes the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The reason is that rewarding employees differentially according to their job performance will motivate them to improve their contributions on the job; which, in turn, should enhance organizational performance. Indeed, performance-related management systems can be pivotal in the achievement of organizational objectives.However, the transfer of management systems from a particular cultural context to cultural contexts with different characteristics is risky. In China, how to successfully design and implement of this system? A major issue should be the willingness of Chinese employees to abide with the individually based performance-related reward systems'principles. As attitudes are rooted into values, this points directly to the issue of national culture, as culture is the reflection of collective value.The study investigated the attitudes of Chinese and American workers towards individually based performance-related reward systems. Chinese participants were 102 workers studied in a MBA program of Missouri State University. The American participants were 115 alumni of Missouri State University. This study makes use of SPSS statistics software to analyze the survey data in order to study the attitudes of Chinese and American employees to the reward systems and the impact of the traditional Chinese cultural characteristics on the attitudes of the employees and to give some suggestions for enterprises to implement the systems.There are four main parts in this thesis. First, the thesis clarifies the subject and its significance, and then overviews previous related research outcomes, establishes the research framework. In line with hypotheses, the Chinese and the American attitudes towards equality and equity-based rewarding were negatively and positively related, respectively, with attitudes towards individually based performance-related reward systems. Also in line with expectations, the belief that performance evaluations are affected by interpersonal relationships (Guanxi) were negatively related to the attitude towards individually based performance-related reward systems, and the belief of Mianzi were not related to the attitude. However, in contrast to hypotheses, participants reported a more positive attitude towards equity than towards equality-based rewarding. Furthermore, in contrast to the relevant hypothesis, the attitude of participants towards individually based performance-related reward systems was positive. And the "Guanxi" and "Mianzi" have nothing relationship with the American employees'attitudes towards the systems. The implication of the study is that although the views of Chinese employees towards individually based performance-related reward systems are in principle positive, the cultural characteristics of China, and in particular Guanxi, must be taken into account for the successful design and functioning of such systems in the Chinese organizational context. At the end, according to the conclusion of this study the writer gives some suggestions to enterprise manager, and figure out the limitation of this thesis.