Although gender-based division of labour and the identity theory of stress suggest that the relationship between work and family demands and life stress may vary as a function of gender, it is largely unknown whether these arguments are also valid in China. To address this gap in the existing literature, the current study investigates the gender differences in perceived work and family demands, and the effects of these perceived demands on the life stress of Chinese male and female employees. The study of 153 married Chinese employees found that Chinese women perceived a higher level of family demands than did Chinese men, whereas there was no significant gender difference in the perception of work demands. In addition, while perceived family demands were similarly related to life stress differently for men and women, perceived work demands were associated more strongly with the life stress of men than that of women.

Drawing on institutional theory, this study empirically examines the relationship between a firm's levels of ownership concentration and product innovation and the mediating effect of learning orientation, using a sample of 351 Chinese firms. Does ownership concentration hinder or promote firm innovation? Perspectives on this relationship are divergent. This study examines the link between ownership concentration and product innovation and further examines whether and how ownership influences firm innovation through organizational learning. The results suggest that ownership concentration has an inverse U-shaped relationship to product innovation and to learning orientation. In addition, learning orientation mediates the curvilinear relationship between ownership concentration and product innovation. We discuss the study's contributions, managerial implications and directions for future research.

This study seeks to explain why firms respond in different ways to similarexternal administrative pressures, such as government demands for charitablegiving, particularly in a transitional economy such as China's. Taking theperspective of the CEO's representation on external demands, the studyexplores the relationship between political affiliation and corporategiving, stimulated by powerful and politically affiliated CEOs, who are thegovernment's natural constituency and who comply with governmental demandsfor donation. The study introduces contingent factors that influence theCEO's perception of how to satisfy government demands, and that moderate therelationship between political affiliation and corporate giving. Usingfirm-level data of corporate contributions following the Sichuan earthquakeof May 12, 2008, we find that corporations with CEOs who hold politicalaffiliations have a significantly higher probability of donation and alsomore cash giving. This relationship is moderated by contingent factors suchas government ownership, financial condition, and concentration of votingrights.

International joint ventures (IJV) are an important organizational mode for expanding and sustaining global business and have been of special relevance for the emerging Chinese market for decades. While IJVs offer specific economic advantages they also present serious management problems that lead to high failure rates, especially in developing countries. Because of the strategic relevance of IJVs and corresponding management challenges, research on success factors for managing IJVs in China has received broad attention, resulting in a variety of studies. However, there are no conceptual syntheses of the literature to date and further development in the field is hampered by both a lack of consolidation of what is known and identification of viable avenues for future research. We address this gap by building on existing concepts in the field, developing them further and synthesizing them into an integrative, theory-based framework of IJV success factors. We use this framework to systematically depict the results of both empirical studies related to Sino-foreign IJVs and to IJVs in general. Finally, we draw important implications from the research and propose potential paths for future study.

Firms are often criticized for their reluctance to embrace sustainability in their business strategies. Frugal innovation is a recent concept that represents a new way for firms to serve underserved customers in developing countries while also promoting sustainability. Based on three cases of frugal innovation at the grassroots level in India, this article demonstrates how frugal innovation presents a promising way to tackle some of today's pressing societal problems with new business models. We use a range of parameters for economic, social, and environmental sustainability to strengthen the case for frugal innovation. This article attempts to inspire scholars to consider frugal innovation further in their future research endeavors and encourage firms to integrate it into their existing business models.

Laboratory studies of culture and creativity typically rely upon measures of divergent thinking while studies of creativity in organizational settings explicitly define creativity and use subject matter experts as assessors to account for the influence of culture on the assessment of creativity. Yet, little is known about what specific characteristics of a creative idea are considered when creativity is assessed by communities of experts (the field) in different spheres of creative activities (domain). In this article, we review, conceptually analyse, and illustrate using original interview data the influence of culture on the assessment of two commonly examined dimensions of overall creativity, novelty, and usefulness. Using the context of expatriates, we propose a framework, along with propositions, that integrates cultural experience, creativity criteria, and assessor perspectives on creativity assessment. Finally, we discuss ways in which a focus upon the processes underlying creativity assessments could help advance research on culture and creativity.

While prior research generally acknowledges the positive effect of corporate philanthropy (CP) on firm performance, the underlying mechanisms regarding how or why CP leads to better financial performance remain unclear. We argue that employees as an influential firm stakeholder group may act as an important factor in realizing the value of CP. We specifically ground this study in social identity theory to investigate whether or not employees support CP by increasing labor productivity, as well as whether a firm's salary level and market visibility will moderate such an effect. Evidence from Chinese listed firms suggests that CP positively influences labor productivity. In addition, self-compared salaries and firm visibility strengthen the link between CP and labor productivity, suggesting that the value of CP depends on the support of key stakeholders such as employees.

Drawing on expectancy theory and the socioemotional wealth (SEW) perspective, we propose that family owners with intrafamily succession intention are more motivated to accumulate or preserve SEW. As corporate philanthropy is a critical way for family-controlled firms to accumulate or maintain SEW, family owners with intrafamily succession intention are more likely to engage in corporate philanthropic activities. Data on a nationally representative sample of family-controlled firms in China support our prediction. We also find that the relationship between intrafamily succession intention and corporate philanthropy is moderated by family owners’ social status and religiosity. The findings contribute to our understanding about family businesses, in general, and those in China, in particular, as well as the SEW perspective.

This paper explores the relationship between poetry and leadership – in particular, how business leaders might leverage poetry in practice. Drawing on the theoretical lenses of logic of appropriateness and ambiguity, we suggest a conceptual model to understand the multilayered meaning of poetry, noting that poetry has four layers of meaning: the superficial meaning, the poet's evocative meaning, the reader's recasting into a modern situation, and the recipient's interpretation. Using the storytelling research method, we collected leadership narrative stories that indicate poetry as an effective communication tool in practicing leadership. From these data, we identify four approaches that leaders use to apply the multilayered meaning of poetry in contemporary business practice: drawing lessons from poets' experience through critical interpretation of the poem, inspiring leaders' heroic spirits, guiding leaders' rules of behavior, and adopting poetry as a tactic to influence others. Our study contributes to the argument of ambiguity as a source of intelligence and illuminates how poetry as an artistic form of story facilitates contemporary leadership practice in light of the logic of appropriateness framework.

Studies on the relationship between corporate social responsibilities (CSR) and firm performance have mostly looked at large public firms in developed countries. In this study, we analyze this relationship using a sample of privately owned firms in China, a developing economy context. We hypothesize a negative relationship between commitment to CSR and average sales growth for privately-owned firms operating in weak institutional environments. Further, we hypothesize that smaller firms will show a stronger negative relationship than larger firms. CEO survey data from a sample of 630 Chinese private firms confirm the moderating role of firm size. However, the results are not entirely as expected. The negative relationship is observed in small firms (100 or fewer employees), but the relationship is positive for large firms (greater than 1000 employees), consistent with the literature. We discuss implications for public policy and future research.

India began the process of market liberalization that opened it to significant interactions with the world economy in 1991. In this essay, we provide an overarching view of the country's journey toward integration with the global innovation and entrepreneurship network. Major nodes in this global network have two major components that may be metaphorically referred to as ‘pillars and ivy’. Globally connected multinational enterprises (MNEs) form the pillars. Agile startups are the ivy, and their success (metaphorically, the height to which they can climb) depends on their symbiotic connections with the pillar MNEs. Both components are essential and reinforce each other. Without MNEs, the scaling of startups is hampered. Without a vibrant population of startups, MNEs’ interest in a location remains driven by cost, rather than capability and creativity. MNEs (mainly foreign) provided the initial sparks for the formation of the Indian innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem. We chart the subsequent growth of India's startups. They began in the information technology (IT) sector but now cover a much wider range of industries. Today, India's innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem is one of the largest in the world, with global integration in terms of technology, financing, human capital, and administration.

In this article, I argue that in emerging markets firms' market capabilities are positively related to the political strategies that they employ to reduce the risks of expropriation by public and private entities. I focus specifically on the moderating conditions, including institutional environments that have direct constraint on governmental power, supportive policies that promote private sector growth, and developed legal systems. My empirical analysis utilizes data on privately owned Chinese enterprises. The results show that firms' market capabilities – as indicated by their asset turnover ratios and R&D intensity – are positively related to their likelihood of participating in key policymaking political organizations but this relationship is weaker in provinces that have more effective constraints on governmental power, more supportive policies for private sector growth, and more developed legal systems.

In this paper, I review the history and current practices of enterprise culture management in China from an insider's perspective. Based on a systematic analysis of case study reports on enterprise culture published in the academic and practitioners' journals, I analysed how enterprise culture was understood and implemented in organizations of different ownership forms. I also discuss the Chinese characteristics and the influence of Western management techniques in the manifestation of Chinese enterprise culture. I argue that the configuration of Chinese organizational culture is heavily influenced by societal culture, in that there is a relatively heavier focus on relationship management than on performance management, at least based on the rhetoric of the enterprise managers.

We consider Chinese cultural, psychological and social factors that are likely to place boundaries on the applicability of DeNisi and Pritchard's motivational framework and discuss how these cultural barriers play out at each of the links in their model. We conclude with a summary and a discussion of some of the broader implications of applying models of work motivation to a Chinese economy in transition.

In this article we test a model of bounded empowerment: the boundary conditions under which power sharing affects employees' psychological empowerment. Using data from two telecommunication companies, we investigate how management control and power distance orientation moderate the effects of supervisors' power sharing on employees' psychological empowerment. Results show that power sharing improves job performance partly through psychological empowerment. Furthermore, management control enhances rather than impedes the positive effect of power sharing on psychological empowerment. Power distance orientation further enhances management control's positive moderating effect on employee psychological empowerment. Limitations and implications for future research are also discussed.

Currently, the mechanism in which informal institutions, recently discovered as an influential, new paradigm in business and management studies interact with and shape formal institutions remains unclear. Helmke and Levitsky (2004) proposed an outcome-based typology for the interaction of informal institutions with formal ones. By using a structured approach for literature aggregation, we test the proposed typology of Helmke and Levitsky by applying this method to 74 empirical studies to investigate the influence of guanxi on formal institutions. We conclude that guanxi fits into none of the proposed categories perfectly. As a result, we propose the relationship between guanxi and formal institutions as auxiliary as well as competing concurrently, leading to convergent and divergent outcomes, respectively. Moreover, we propose a third category to add to the existing typology, namely ‘formal institutions in transition’. We furthermore incorporate a dynamic aspect to the model by adding two further categories, concerned with the direction of the development. We believe the resulting extension to the original typology of Helmke and Levitsky accurately accounts for the dynamic nature of informal institutions as well as their important role in shaping effective formal institutions.

As Peng, Ahlstrom, Carraher, and Shi (2017) rightly noted, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protection in a country is not static. It evolves over time. Peng et al. (this issue) revealed through their historical analysis that during the 19th century, the US was not a leading IPR advocate but a leading IPR violator. It was only when indigenous inventors, authors, and organizations of the US emerged and demanded protection of their IPR in foreign countries in the late 19th century that the US passed the International Copyright Act (the Chace Act) in 1891 to extend IPR protection to foreign works. The US case illustrated that a country's IPR system as an institution evolves as its economy and society develop. If we examine this evolution over a relatively long time span, the change can be quite dramatic. Therefore, when reviewing a country's IPR system, an important question to be asked is in which direction the country's IPR system evolves.