Why Do Companies Create Harmonious Cultures? Comparing the Influence of Different Corporate Cultures on Employees

摘要

The fourth plenary session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China put forward building socialist harmonious societies and the sixth plenary session of the 16th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China pointed out creating harmonious culture is an important task for building a socialist harmonious society. Building a harmonious society requires all companies to create a harmonious culture, because the company is the basic unit of society. Why do companies need to advocate harmonious culture during a period of economic transition? To research this question, the authors analyzed the background of promoting harmonious culture and discussed the meaning and characteristics of harmonious culture. The authors found that harmonious culture has many similar character istics of clan culture, which is one of the types of culture in a competing values framework (Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1981;Cameron and Quinn, 1998). The authors compared the influence of different corporate cultures on employees to find how harmonious culture is created. This paper measured the influence of corporate culture on employees in terms of organizational commitment, job satisfaction, turnover intention, contextual performance, and task performance.This study sent two versions of a questionnaire, one is a paper version and the other is a computer version. 498 questionnaires were returned and 422 questionnaires were valid, representing a response rate of 84. 74％. The results showed that this scale possessed high reliability and validity. So this scale could be used to measure the influence of corporate culture on employees.This paper found two important conditions. First, this study found corporate culture can be divided into clan culture, hierarchal culture and external-oriented culture in the Chinese context. We can better understand Chinese companies in this way. The authors analyzed the reasons that came from traditional culture and a transitional economy. Second, the results indicated that clan culture influenced organizational commitment, job satisfaction, and contextual performance positively and influenced turnover intention negatively; hierarchal culture influenced job satisfaction positively; external-oriented culture influenced organizational commitment and job satisfaction positively; none of the cultures influenced task performance significantly. This paper studied how harmonious culture is created in companies by comparing the influence of corporate culture on employees via a structural equa tion model. Clan culture, which is similar with harmonious culture, has a profound foundation and fits a transforming economy and influences employees' attitudes, behaviors and performance positively. Chinese companies should create a harmonious culture during a period of economic transition.