When employees fail in Chinese enterprises: attribution, responsibility, and constructive criticism

Abstract

When an employee fails to meet certain standards in the workplace, judgments of responsibility can influence the type of feedback and criticism made by managers or colleagues to motivate target employees. However, in Chinese culture, in which cultural norms regarding criticism can be quite different from those in Western countries, the relationships among these variables from an attributional perspective remain widely unstudied in the HRM field. In this study, 196 participants from Chinese business environments made attributions and emotional judgments for a workplace failure, and then made suggestions for how to respond to the failing employee (i.e. constructive criticism). A structural equation model that reflected the relationships among attributional variables, affect responses, and constructive criticism decisions was tested. Results suggested that, similar to Western countries, Chinese participants assigned behavioral responsibility according to causal locus as well as the perception of controllability. Responsibility inferences elicited anger and sympathy and contributed to constructive criticism decisions. Findings are discussed in terms of the similarities and differences in attributional processes across cultures.

Keywords:

• attributional theory
• China
• criticism
• decisions
• HRM
• responsibility

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges support received from the program for innovation research in Central University of Finance and Economics and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 70771117), NCET-07-0893 and CUFE project of 211, and would like to thank Professor Bernard Weiner and the members of the attribution interest group in UCLA for their great suggestions regarding this research.