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The ethics of
The ethics of employment employment
relations in China: a meta-analysis relations
Yanzhen He and Tingting Cai
School of Management, Xiamen University, 341
Xiamen, People’s Republic of China

Abstract
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate the extant literature on ethics of
employment relations in China. Toward that goal, a meta-analytic approach is employed to conclude
the business ethical issues from different results and lay foundation for further research by deeply
understanding ethics of employment relation in China.
Design/methodology/approach – A systematic literature review procedure is developed to
identify all relevant articles and meta-analytic procedures are used to identify issues related to ethics
of employment relations in China.
Findings – The results suggest there are not many researches on business ethics, especially ethics of
employment relations in China. The authors examine the researches about business ethics in research
methodology, research perspective, ethical dimensions of employment relations and relationship
between variables and find some disadvantages. The authors feel ethics of employment relations in
China should cause more concern, in both the theoretical and practical areas.
Originality/value – The paper explores academics’ perceptions towards ethical issues related to
employment relations and shows the importance of ethics during the development of Chinese
companies.
Keywords China, Business development, Ethics, Corporate responsibility, Governance,
Employment relation, Ethical responsibilities, Meta-analysis
Paper type Research paper

I. Introduction
With the booming of China’s economy, the labor relations in China have shown apparent
characteristics of “weak labor” and “strong capital”. The employers pay more attention
to efficiency, which leads to dominance of labor conflict and the various contradictions
between labor and capital aroused wide concern among the business community and
academia. In particular, Foxconn’s “jumping storm” triggered indeep thinking of all
parties and put forward a series of management propositions: is corporate responsibility
to employees just limited to “no violation of laws”? From an external perspective,
“The Labor Contract Law of the People’s Republic of China”, “Employment Promotion
Law” and several other labor laws have lifted enterprise employment relations to a new
platform and prompted more enterprises to rethink issues of employment relations.
Internally, the new generation of labor force has become the mainstream workforce;
their mode of thinking and characteristics of behavior showing significant differences
with their parents’ generation. They have stronger awareness of their own rights and
are used to thinking from a self-perspective. Personalities and lifestyles of the
new-generation employees bring about new challenges for employment relations. Chinese Management Studies
Vol. 6 No. 2, 2012
Early empirical research of the author shows that enterprises of different natures in pp. 341-349
different sectors in China shoulder different social responsibilities for their employees, q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
1750-614X
especially private enterprises and labor-intensive industries of which the employment DOI 10.1108/17506141211236767
CMS relations are not optimistic. The interesting result is that the performance of ethical
6,2 responsibilities for staff has the most positive effect on employee performance.
Therefore, the bottleneck of employment relations in China at this stage is more
prominent in the ethical dimensions of business. Although we cannot rely on the
coercive power of the state to ensure its fulfillment, it precisely reflects that the needs of
young employee development and equal opportunities are a concern. Once this issue is
342 resolved, the enterprises’ intentional or disguised “violation of laws” in labor issues
will be solved.

Overview
According to Carroll’s definition in 1979, ethical responsibility refers to the
responsibility of a company to obey social standards, norms and values. In other
words, a company must observe social ethics, act according to the principle of fairness
and focus on the rights and interests of stakeholders. When this definition is applied
in employment relation management, companies are required to proactively shoulder
ethical responsibilities related to employees without going against the society’s
expectation for them. For example, companies are supposed to provide employees with a
comfortable working environment, fair development opportunities, participation in
company management and communication management, etc. Hence, ethical
responsibility about employment management manifests itself more in a managers’
attitude, especially the role of managers in managing employment relations.
At present, research on business ethics in China mostly consists of general studies.
On the one hand, studies are conducted from the standpoint of inheriting and
developing Chinese traditional ethics. On the other hand, the Chinese enterprise ethics
issue is analyzed by using fundamental principles of Western ethics and efforts in
constructing a Chinese enterprise ethical system have been made by means of
ideological education. These studies are just the simple enumeration of ethical problems
and corresponding solutions. In fact, ethical problems that are embedded in employee
management constantly run throughout the whole management process. According to
studies outside China, ethical problems exist in a variety of human resource
management practices, such as recruitment, remuneration and reward system,
redundancy decision-making, training and development. Among the ethical problems
reported by human resource managers, the most severe ones occur during recruitment,
training and development, such as making decisions according to personal preference,
carrying out differential payment, promoting employees that are close to company
seniors, sexual harassment, sexual discrimination in recruiting, directing rules and
regulations against the individual instead of the business, ignoring performance during
employee evaluation and disrespecting employees (Fusilier et al., 1996; Mathis and
Jackson, 1997). In judging the normalization of ethical behavior, four ethical factors are
put forward by Winstanley and Woodall (2000): the fundamental civil rights and
employment rights, social and organizational equity, humanism and goal congruence.
Besides, Wiley (2000) set five criteria: integrity, legality, proficiency, loyalty and
confidentiality. Also, Schumann (2001) raised five ethical principles: utilitarian ethics,
rights ethics, distributive justice ethics, care ethics and virtue ethics (Schumann, 2001).
Although explanations are different, these viewpoints have further analyzed ethical
problems in employment relations and lay a solid foundation for future empirical
research. By contrast, China’s effort in reviewing and classifying existing studies is not
enough and traditional literature reviewers tend to have different opinions. Therefore, The ethics of
by adopting meta-analysis approach, the article aims to draw more reliable conclusion employment
from different results in congeneric research and lay the foundation for further research.
relations
II. Description of sample
In order to get a thorough understanding of the status of research on the ethics of
employment relation, we search articles included in CNKI and ProQuest before April 343
2011, with “employment relation”, “labor relation” and “corporation ethics” as keywords
and titles and with the following criteria in screening the articles:
.
the articles discuss enterprise ethical problems from the perspective of
employment relation; and
.
the ethical problems mentioned should be set in Chinese companies.

Finally, we obtained 86 literatures, including 76 Chinese and ten English, as Table I

shows.
According to Table I, the literature on the ethics of Chinese employment relations
increased year by year. They can be divided into three stages. The first stage (2002-2003)
was the period of rudiment. In this period, research was relatively simple, generally
concluding that employment relation management should consider ethical problems.
The researchers did not touch on details and related issues. The second stage (2004-2006)
was the period of development. In this period, most were theoretical studies and studied
employment relation more comprehensively from the ethical perspective, with
elaboration of the ethical problems in employment relation as well as their reasons
and solutions. The third stage (since 2008) was the period of maturity. Characteristics of
this period are as follows: research topics were expanded; research was deepened;
numbers of studies grew significantly, including more master thesis and doctoral
dissertation. Meanwhile, the ethical problems related to employment relation started to
link with the performance of the company and employee and the ethics of employment
relation has become a hot issue.

Year CNKI CDMD-D CDMD-M ProQuest Total (n)

1997 0 0 0 1 1
1998 0 0 0 2 2
2001 0 0 0 1 1
2002 1 0 0 2 3
2003 1 0 0 1 2
2004 7 0 0 1 8
2005 4 1 1 1 7
2006 4 1 0 0 5
2007 5 2 0 1 8
2008 7 2 1 0 10
2009 12 1 1 0 14 Table I.
2010 20 2 0 0 22 Research on ethics of
2011 3 0 0 0 3 employment relation
Subtotal 64 9 3 10 86 in China
CMS III. Research status
6,2 Methodology
The methods of research can be divided into two categories: empirical research and
non-empirical research. The empirical articles capture the essence of research by relying
on observation and non-empirical articles are those that are primarily based on ideas,
frameworks and speculation rather than on systematic observation (Alavi and Carlson,
344 1992). In this article, we classify the literature by research methods and first author.
There are 61 non-empirical researches, accounting for 70.93 percent of total samples.
Analysis of the background of first authors showed that 90.63 percent are from
universities and practitioners account for only 4.69 percent, as is shown in Table II:
(1) Non-empirical research. Among the 61 non-empirical research papers, the
method of “point of view” (63.93 percent) and “theoretical explanation”
(26.23 percent) were most widely used, more than 90 percent of the total, while
“conceptual model” and “tools/methods/model applied” were not adopted in any
literature, as specified in Table III.
(2) Empirical research. The article adopts the classification of Li Huaizu (2004),
who classified empirical research methods into experimental research,
questionnaire, interview, text analysis, statistical analysis of existing data,

CNKI
Universities Practitioner Unknown CDMD-D CDMD-M ProQuest Total(n)

Table II. Non-empirical

Research method and research 44 3 3 5 2 4 61
background of first Empirical research 14 0 0 4 1 6 25
author Subtotal 58 3 3 9 3 10 86

Tools/ Conceptual
Point of Conceptual methods/ Concepts Theoretical framework and
Method view model model review explanation its application Total(n)

Amount 39 0 0 1 16 5 61
Percent 63.93 0.00 0.00 1.64 26.23 8.20 100.00
1997 0 0 0 0 1 0 1
1998 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1999 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2001 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2002 2 0 0 0 0 0 2
2003 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2004 4 0 0 1 1 1 7
2005 2 0 0 0 4 0 6
2006 3 0 0 0 2 0 5
2007 5 0 0 0 2 0 7
2008 3 0 0 0 2 1 6
2009 7 0 0 0 1 0 8
2010 8 0 0 0 3 3 14
Table III. 2011 3 0 0 0 0 0 3
Non-empirical research Subtotal 39 0 0 1 16 5 61
 historical/comparative analysis and field study. In the 25 empirical articles, The ethics of
questionnaire and field study (case study) had the highest proportion, employment
accounting for 80 percent of total. Methods such as interviews and statistical
analysis of existing data were not used in the selected articles. Details are shown relations
in Table IV.

Research perspective 345

In terms of research perspective, the selected literature can be divided into the
following categories: theoretical explanation of business ethics (including the evolution
of business ethics, models, features, issues and countermeasures, etc.), comparative
study (on ownership, region, sex of workers, etc.), concern over the nature of business
(private, state, family, multinational corporations, etc.), the relationship between
business ethical behavior and employee behavior (employee satisfaction, job-hopping,
employee performance, etc.), the relationship between business ethical behavior and
organizational performance (including organizational competitiveness). This show that
the discussion of ethics of employment relation mainly focused on theoretical
explanations (46.51 percent), followed by analysis of ethical issues of companies with
different nature (19.77 percent), the focus of which was ethical issues and
corresponding solutions. Accordingly, domestic research on ethics of employment
relation mainly concentrated on theoretical aspects, as is shown in Table V.

Ethical dimensions of employment relations

Of all the literature, a total of 70 articles discussed employment relation from ethical
dimensions, while different studies illustrated ethical issues from different dimensions.
Among the articles screened, although the corresponding dimension of ethics was not
specified, through the induction of their literal expression, the views of these studies can be

Statistical
analysis
of Historical/
Experimental Text existing comparative Field Total
Method research Questionnaire Interview analysis data analysis study (n)

Amount 1 15 0 2 0 2 5 25
Percent 4 60 0 8 0.00 8 20 100
1997 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
1998 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2001 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 1
2002 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2003 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2004 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2005 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2006 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
2007 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 1
2008 0 0 0 1 0 2 1 4
2009 0 4 0 2 0 0 0 6
2010 0 5 0 0 0 0 3 8
2011 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 Table IV.
Subtotal 1 15 0 3 0 2 4 25 Empirical research
CMS summarized in Table VI, into ethical values, employee rights, fair, open, ethic caring,
6,2 respect, democracy and ethical norms. Among them, the unity of right and obligation in
the ethical values (54.29 percent) and fairness (47.14 percent) were most extensively
involved. In other words, currently studies on ethical issues of employment relation
management laid more emphasis on these two aspects.

346 Relationship between variables in empirical research

According to statistics of earlier empirical research, the domestic research on ethics of
employment relation focused on non-empirical research, with empirical researches taking
up only 29.07 percent. A part of the empirical research articles did not study variables, but
conducted case study or text analysis to draw relevant conclusion, hence the relationship
between variables in empirical research was relatively simple.
In empirical studies, generally five types of variables were involved: independent
variable, dependent variable, intermediate variable, moderate variable and control variable.
By classifying variables, it can be found that among the domestic researches on ethics of
employment relation, business ethics were associated with employee behavior, organization
performance, corporate characteristics and similar variables as is shown in Table VII.

IV. Discussion
Judging from the existing literature, due attention had not been paid to ethics of
employment relation in Chinese enterprise. At the beginning of reform and opening-up,
corporate efficiency was overly concerned about by the academia and business circle,
while soft management on ethical, spiritual and emotional levels was ignored. Until recent
years, with incidents such as “collective switch”, “karoshi”, “arrears of wage” are exposed
and cases of labor disputes have dramatically increased. The cause of these incidents is not

Research perspective Paper %

Theoretical explanation 40 46.51

Comparative study 11 12.79
Focusing on the nature of business 17 19.77
Relationship between business ethical behavior and employee behavior 14 16.28
Table V. Relationship between business ethical behavior and organizational performance 4 4.65
Research perspective Total (n) 86 100.00

Dimension Paper Percentage

Ethical values
Honest and trustworthy 26 37.14
Unity of justice and benefit 38 54.29
Humanism 12 17.14
Employee rights 8 11.43
Fair 33 47.14
Openness 6 8.57
Ethical caring 28 40.00
Table VI. Respect and democracy 25 35.71
Dimensions of ethics Ethical norms 16 22.86
 The ethics of
Independent Intermediate Control
variable Dependent variable variable Moderate variable variable Subtotal employment
Business Employee
relations
ethics behavior
Misbehavior Misbehavior Personality traits 1
Job-hopping 1 347
Job satisfaction 1
Employee 1
performance
Organizational Sex, age of 1
commitment employee and
corporate size
Organizational 1
performance
Corporate Character of 2
nature enterprise ethics
Enterprise Psychological Sex, education, 1
ethics contracts service year
Corporate Employment 1
responsibility relation
Sex Ethics awareness 1
Orientation Organizational Size, local, 1
to employee performance age,
Local Ethics Age, sex industry industry
Manager’s Ethics awareness Nationality 1
value Table VII.
Nationality of Ethics 2 Variables in empirical
company research

whether people have legal awareness. Rather, the underlying cause is how enterprises
regard employees’ rights and values. The key constraint on business conduct lies in
internal self-regulation rather than simple extrinsic motivation. Based on such
background, although the number of researches in this field in absolute terms was still
low, but the speed of growth has increased more than doubled. This has aroused wide
public concern. Especially, with the increase of empirical researches, the research results
will trigger more reflection from the business circle and promote the development in both
academics and practice in this field.

Characteristics of present literatures

Due to research still being in the initial stage, it has the following characteristics.
First, compared to mere emphasis on the empty “people-oriented” idea at the early stage,
attention has been drawn to the idea of “mutual benefit” which is based on the interests
of both the company and employees. Specifically, the protection of employees’ interests has
aroused wide concern as they are important stakeholders. Especially, the concept of social
responsibility for stakeholders proposed by Carroll (1979) had made it more rational in
dealing with relationship between enterprise interests and employee interests more rational.
Second, judging from the application of research methods, the methods are becoming
increasingly abundant. Multi-dimensional researches using different methods provide
strong support for understanding each ethical dimension of employment relation.
CMS In terms of the research perspective, there are traditional discussions of ethics as well as
6,2 comparative research, industry analysis and cultural analysis of different countries. On
the whole, research in this field in China has had a good beginning, the existing
researches, the analysis of the ethical dimensions, in particular, has laid a sound
foundation for further research.

348 Drawbacks in existing researches

Due to that specialized research on ethics of employment relation was limited,
especially those against the backdrop of Chinese companies. Therefore, there were
some drawbacks in existing research.
First, viewing from the background of the first author, the proportion of practitioners
was too low. This reflects that ethics of employment relation has not aroused enough
attention in practice and the current study seems to be “castles in the air”.
Second, in regard of research perspective, research has simply elaborated opinions
without supporting empirical data, which made their viewpoints far from being
innovative. Crucially, ethical issue was the core problem in culture, yet current results did
not reflect characteristics of Chinese culture. The reason is that the research framework is
derived from studies abroad and interviews and other empirical research were not adopted
to achieve extension and innovation.
Third, in relation to the research topic, ethical issues were diverse therefore research
in this field did not seek the best model. Although comparative studies had been
carried out in current research, a corresponding Chinese model, or division and
interpretation of different types of ethics had not yet been generalized.
Finally, research on the relationship between ethical issue and other variables were
relatively monotonous. The most common variables were performance, personal
background and organizational background.

V. Conclusion and further research

In this article, we only conclude the research about the ethics of employment relation in
China. A meta-analytic approach is employed. We do not research the problems in a
meticulous and deep way, but only present the full view about current studies. Our
purpose is to conclude the business ethical issues from different results and lay foundation
for further research by deeply understanding ethics of employment relation in China.
Based on analysis above, importance should be attached to the following points in
future studies:
.
Study of ethical dimensions in enterprises should combine profound essence of
Chinese culture especially in the context of unique Chinese business culture, so as
to contribute to foreign research development.
.
Comparison of domestic and foreign studies of ethics of employment relation and
comparative studies of different countries will help Chinese enterprises adapt to
local environment and develop better in overseas markets.
.
More effort should made in the exploration of empirical research methods. Although
the ethical issue has been discussed since time immemorial while some opinions
remain slogan, the core component has not been fully analyzed. Empirical research
should use innovative approaches to tap the key content, carry forward the
advantages of traditional culture and abandon its dross.
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About the authors

Yanzhen He has a PhD in Management and is an Associate Professor in the School of Management,
Xiamen University. Her research areas cover labor relations, corporate training, compensation
systems, recruitment and other aspects of human resource management. Yanzhen He is the
corresponding author and can be contacted at: yanzhenhe@xmu.edu.cn
Tingting Cai is a student in the School of Management, Xiamen University.

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