An exploratory analysis for employee and organization development: China

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ABSTRACT

One impact of globalisation has been the expansion of higher education to meet changing current socio-economic and political requirements. This expansion places considerable stress on the public purse and many states have turned to alternative solutions. In China, a new phenomenon has emerged: independent higher education institutions that complement public and private institutions in helping to cater for the expanded numbers of students. These independent institutions are formed through partnerships between existing institutions and the business sector. After analysing the political, socio-economic and cultural contexts that shape the policy of developing independent institutions, this paper explores the dilemmas and challenges that have arisen at the implementation level and critiques some of the solutions that have been found.This study contributes to strategic human resource management (HRM) research by offering a contextualized model of HRM effectiveness. Building on HR attribution theory, we propose that the high commitment work system will be more effective in a context when: (i) employees are conditioned to trust employers and (ii) regulatory institutions are less restrictive, giving management more autonomy in human resource decisions. In such contexts, we argue that employees are more inclined to view the high commitment work system as an expression of the employer's genuine concern for employees. Hence, employees are more likely to reciprocate with high commitment. We find our contextualized HRM effectiveness model particularly useful in understanding HRM - firm performance relations in China where business environments are currently under transformation on both trust and regulations.

TABLE OF CONTENT

ABSTRACT2

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION4

Research Questions5

CHAPTER 2: LITERATURE REVIEW7

Organizational Outcomes7

HCWS, Context, and Employee Responses8

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY10

Timescale11

REFERENCES12

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Higher education has flourished under globalisation, which has led to an increase in student enrolments. The changing nature of socio-economic needs and the increasing complexity of skills and competences required for future employment have resulted in governments around the world seeking to expand their provision of higher education. This expansion has placed strains on the public purse, especially in times of harsh economic circumstances. Governments have sought to increase the engagement of private agencies in higher education and to allow the development of competition and market. The competitive ethos and marketisation have produced four layers of educational-social practices in higher education: the lived educational practices of the academic (teaching, writing, examining, administering); the social quest for status as students compete for educational opportunities and institutions compete for prestige on the basis of research and scholarship; the economic competition for social status as institutions deploy strategies from the market place to gain prestige; and commercial endeavours, through which institutions seek to generate income to fund other activities.

Recognizing the impact of contextual factors on HRM effectiveness is particularly important for studying SHRM in transitional economies such as China. Over the last decade, scholarly interest on the organizational consequences of HRM has grown dramatically in China. A major observation by these scholars is that SHRM models of Western origin have limited usefulness in explaining China-specific phenomena, particularly the role of economic reformation and ownership ...