Predictors of employees’ strike attitudes in multinational corporations in China: a multilevel relational model
Published: 2023-1-2
Journal: The International Journal of Human Resource Management
Abstract
Abstract China experienced an unprecedented increase in labor strikes until the mid-2010s, and the country continues to experience considerable strike activity. Therefore, it is important to study what predicts Chinese workers’ attitudes toward strikes. The study applies social exchange theory as an overarching framework to investigate the contributions of three forms of social exchange relations in organizations—employee-employer relations, labor-management relations, and leader-member relations—to account for Chinese employees’ attitudes toward strikes in multinational corporations (MNCs) based in China. Using a matched employee-employer sample of more than 1,600 employees in 41 China-based MNCs, the results obtained from hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) analysis show that individual-perceived employee-employer relations indicated by a negative reciprocity norm is positively related to employees’ strike attitudes. Labor-management relations indicated by the organizational-level cooperative industrial relations (IR) climate is negatively related to employees’ strike attitudes. Leader-member relations indicated by leader-member exchange (LMX) is not significantly related to employees’ strike attitudes. Overall, the results indicate that at the individual level, it is more important for companies not to do bad (to engage in negative reciprocity with workers) than to do good to reduce employees’ strike attitudes. Keywords: Strike attitudes, reciprocity norm, industrial relations climate, leader-member exchange (LMX) Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Data availability statement The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request. Notes 1 We thank one of the reviewers for this idea. Additional information Funding The authors acknowledge the support from the key program of National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 71832004) and the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Project (Grant No. 20YJA630061).
Faculty Members
- Ying Chen - College of Business, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI, USA
- Yun-Kyoung Kim - Franklin P. Perdue School of Business, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD, USA
- Guofeng Wang - School of Management and Economics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China
- Zhiqiang Liu - School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China;
Themes
- Social exchange theory
- Labor relations
- Industrial relations
- Multinational corporations
- Employee attitudes