The role of employee participation in generating and commercialising innovations: insights from Chinese high-tech firms

Abstract

To date, employee participation finds very little recognition in China in research as well as in management practice. It seems to fundamentally contradict traditional values in Chinese culture. The effect of employee participation on innovation is completely unknown, not only for China, but also for many other emerging economies. In contrast, employee participation finds a lot of recognition in the western world for quite some while. Research suggests that employee participation is particularly relevant for innovations in skilled labour contexts, which are becoming increasingly important also for China. Based on a survey of 620 medium-sized and large companies we are investigating the effect of employee participation on innovation generation and commercialisation in China. In the formulation of our hypotheses we take the moderating effects of incentives into account. The contribution of this article is to give evidence on the explanation power of the western concept of employee participation outside the western world. This allows for a better understanding of the robustness of the concept towards cultural context factors.

Keywords::

• China
• employee-driven innovation (EDI)
• employee participation
• innovation
• monetary incentives
• non-monetary incentives

Acknowledgements

This project was supported by the Sino-Danish Research Centre and National Science Foundation (Projects #71072142, #71202147 and #71372161). Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Globelics 2012 conference in Hangzhou, China and the Academy of Management Annual Meeting 2013 in Orlando, FL.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. We distributed the questionnaire via the CEEA. CEEA is affiliated with the Development Research Center of the State Council and it is the only incorporated organisation registered with the Ministry of Civil Affairs specialising in evaluation and research on enterprises nationwide (China Enterprise Evaluation Association, 2013; China Daily, 2013). We invited firms in the overall database to participate in our survey. The overall population in our sampling is corporations from the following lists: Chinese Listed Companies, which was 2342 firms in total at the time we surveyed (China Securities Regulatory Commission, 2012); Chinese Large Firms List; Key Firms List of Ministry of Science and Technology of the PRC; and Key Firms List of Provincial Association for Science and Technology. In addition, there are many small and medium-sized firms registered in the association. The CEEA covers firms in sectors such as transportation, telecommunication, finance, architecture, tourism, and imports and exports. Altogether, the population from which we sampled is over 9271 firms in China.