Small and medium-sized enterprises in China: a literature review, human resource management and suggestions for further research

Abstract

As the importance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) has increased, it has been accompanied by an increase in the amount of research attention paid to them. This has been the case in Asia, and also China. However, this work concentrates mainly on entrepreneurship, small business development and government support. Moreover, the fact is that in terms of issue focus, it is finance, marketing and ownership rather than people management that are the central themes of the discussion. However, there are some studies of human resource management (HRM) in SMEs in China. Our study here provides a broad review of prior work, and the results highlight some important issues for the study of HRM in SMEs and call for the development of more sophisticated theoretical models and more longitudinal research.

Keywords:

• Asia
• China
• human resource management (HRM)
• management
• small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)