Editorial: Taking an indigenous approach to study organizational behavior in China

• Date: 01 July 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2034
• Author: Jiing‐Lih Farh,Hongwei He,Kenneth S. Law,Weichun Zhu
• Published date: 01 July 2015

Editorial: Taking an indigenous approach to study

organizational behavior in China

WEICHUN ZHU

1

*, HONGWEI HE

2

, KENNETH S. LAW

3

AND JIING-LIH FARH

4

1

School of Labor and Employment Relations, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.

2

Marketing Department, University of Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow, Scotland, U.K.

3

Department of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

4

Department of Management, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China

Since the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s“reform and open policy”started in 1978, China’s economy has been

growing rapidly and today is the second largest economy in the world. In the globalization age, China’s economy

has become more integrated and increasingly interdependent with the rest of the world. In this historical transforma-

tive moment, practitioners and academics alike have shown growing interests in management and organizational be-

havioral (OB) issues in the Chinese context. For example, we have seen an increasing number of OB studies using

Chinese samples published in international OB and management journals each year. Although these OB studies have

undoubtedly shed light on the uniqueness and complexity of OB issues in China, most of these studies tend to rely

heavily on Western OB theories and paradigms in testing their proposed hypotheses and make little referenc e to the

contextual factors or indigenous theorization process (Jia, You, & Du, 2011). Thus, there is still very limited

evidence to suggest that these OB theories developed in the Western contexts are fully aligned with traditional

Chinese culture and history, and current economic, social, and cultural developmental stages.

The need for contextualized OB research has been promulgated for more than a decade. Rousseau and Fried

(2001) cited two reasons for the importance of contextualization of OB research: the internationalization of the

OB research domain and the diversification of work and work settings in different cultures. Tsui (2004) made a

distinction between context-embedded research and context-specific indigenous research based on the degree of

contextualization. Whereas context-embedded research is “context-sensitive”and explicitly models contextual

factors as either main effects or as moderators, the indigenous research goes beyond testing an existing theory

to use scientific methods to study local phenomena by using local language, local subjects, and locally meaningful

constructs (Tsui, 2004, 2006). Jia et al. (2011) have recently evaluated 259 articles published in six leading

general management and organization journals between 1981 and 2010, which use the Chinese context for their

theoretical contributions to management and organization research, and found few of them showing serious

attention to context in terms of theorizing and measurement. Thus, there is a strong need for contextualized

OB research in the Chinese context.

Themes and Contributions

This special issue collected five papers (i.e., Chen, Chen, et al., 2015; Chen, Leung, Li, & Ou, 2015; Vogel et al.,

2015; Zhang, Long, Wu, & Huang, 2015; and Zheng, Zhu, Zhao, & Zhang, 2015) that advance the field of

*Correspondence to: Weichun Zhu, School of Labor and Employment Relations, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park 16802,

Pennsylvania, U.S.A. E-mail: wzhu@psu.edu

Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 36, 613–620 (2015)

Published online 19 June 2015 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2034

Editorial