Chinese Managerial Ethics Case Study Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Chinese Managerial Ethics - Case Study Example Both of these schools of thought taught that the interests of the individual should be of less priority than the interests of the community. It should be no surprise that when companies from Western countries have arrived in the last thirty years to do business in this "new" China, they have been surprised by some of the cultural differences. Cultural values in Europe and in the Americas, in many instances, value the individual more than the community. As a result, companies have often gone to China to do business, and come away feeling that they have dealt with a corrupt culture; that they had operated under expectations that turned out to be unproven; that each person within a Chinese company has a different perspective on a given situation, and will even stab each other in the back to gain an advantage (Blackman, 2000). The area of copyright protection is one on which Chinese and many Western companies seem to disagree - many Chinese companies appear to have a more relaxed view on copyright violations (Whitman, Townsend, and Hendrickson, 1999). The confusion resulting from the apparent differences in business ethics between many Western companies and their Chinese counterparts has led to a significant interest in the ethical principles governing Chinese management. Kylie Redfern and John Crawford presented "An Empirical Investigation of the Influence of Modernisation on the Moral Judgement and Managers in the People's Republic of China" in Cross Cultural Management, a vignette-based survey of managers across China that sought their responses to several ethical scenarios. These managers came from 21 of China's 28 provinces, which were ranked by their "modernisation" using a scoring system devised by the authors. The authors combined the provincial scoring system with the attitudinal responses returned by the managers to determine whether managers in more modernised provinces had business ethics that were closer to Western norms than those in less modernised provinces. The research in this paper rests on two assumptions: that Individualism and Collectivism (the desire for individual wealth versus the desire to work for the greater good of one's society) are in opposition, and that exposure to Western values will cause Chinese managerial ethics to "converge" toward those found in Western companies. However, there is research that indicates that the Chinese do not necessarily see a polar opposition between the good of the individual and that of the society (Egri, Ralston, Murray, and Nicholson, 1996). This is in large part due to the Chinese concept of guanxi - a concept of business relationships that is different from that held by most Western companies, and may explain much of the confusion that has hindered positive business dealings between Chinese businesses and companies in the West. Guanxi refers to a complex relationship that combines friendship and partnership, while prizing individual ascendancy as well - a relationship that benefits both the individual and the community. Pye (1992) defines guanxi as a network of "dyadic relationships between individuals in which each can make unlimited demands on the other[involving] reciprocal obligations for assistance"(pp. 4-5). This sounds much like the Confucian (and Communist) ideals of sacrificing one's own personal interest for