Search results

The purpose of this paper is to explore employers' perceptions of China's Labour Contract Law (LCL) and its influence on employment relations and human resource management practices in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

This paper adopts a qualitative approach based on 24 interviews with owners and human resource managers of 23 privately owned SMEs in eastern and western China.

Mixed levels of reported compliance with the provisions of the LCL legislation indicate that the regulatory adoptive behaviours of SME employers are partially explained by the coercive mechanism. Various strategies adopted by employers suggest that when under the pressure of law, SMEs are formalising their employment practices while simultaneously seeking to maintain a degree of informality in respect these practices.

The adopted qualitative approach may limit the findings to be explorative within broader national contexts.

The move towards more formalised practices helps to address issues such as high turnover and widespread labour shortage in SMEs. The paper is likely to be of interest to policymakers seeking to gain insights into employers' perceptions as a means to develop more effective labour regulations.

Unlike most of existing literature examining the general compliance to the LCL and workers' perspectives, this paper reports the views of SME employers; as such, it offers an original contribution to understanding of the role and behaviours of SME employers in regulatory responses in the studied context.

This paper examines the direct and indirect effects of CEO intellectual capital on sustainable growth of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in China.

It adopts a quantitative approach based on 3,474 unbalanced panel data in 836 Chinese listed SMEs from 2008 to 2017.

The findings reveal a significant positive relationship between CEO intellectual capital and sustainable growth of SMEs. The findings also reveal that dual innovation (exploitative innovation and exploratory innovation) has a partial mediating effect on the relationship.

It further provides an original contribution to identifying and testing the mediating effect of dual innovation on the relationship between CEO intellectual capital and sustainable growth of SMEs.

In contrast to most of the extant literature, which considers intellectual capital as a whole at the organizational level or focuses on employee intellectual capital, this paper highlights the role of CEO intellectual capital for SMEs’ growth. It provides an original contribution to identifying and testing the mediating effect of dual innovation on the relationship between CEO intellectual capital and sustainable growth of SMEs.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the evolving perceptions and human resource (HR) responses of owners and HR managers of Chinese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) towards local labour markets in the context of the impact of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic.

This study adopts a two-stage longitudinal qualitative approach involving 52 interviews with owners and HR managers of Chinese SMEs in the pre- and post-pandemic time periods.

The findings reveal a shift from the perceptions of a general labour shortage to perceptions of specialised talent shortages and increasing geographical disparities in local labour markets. They further reveal that SMEs are increasingly likely to adopt efficiency-oriented, flexibility-enhancing HR practices in the face of high uncertainty.

The findings provide insights into the nature of the constraints of SMEs' sustainable development that need to be addressed by policymakers, SME owners and HR managers when they devise and implement policies relating to structure optimisation, labour market integration and mobility enhancement.

In contrast to extant literature that has examined the labour market at the national level, this study explores the views of SMEs (the demand side) by taking a localised perspective on how SMEs have responded to change through their HR practices.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between employees’ perceptions of HRM practices and two outcomes, namely, employee commitment and turnover intention (TI), in small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in mainland China.

This paper adopts a quantitative approach based on a sample of 227 employees working in 24 SMEs in eastern and western China.

Employees’ perceptions of HRM practices, such as training and development, reward management and performance management, are significant predictors of employee commitment. A negative direct relationship is found between employees’ perceptions about the use of HRM practices and TIs.

Although data were collected from two representative provinces of eastern and western China, the size of the sample may limit the generalisability of the findings to the wider region.

The relationship between employees’ perceptions of HRM practices and employee outcomes in Chinese SMEs provides an effective way for SME owners and HR practitioners to generate desirable employee attitudes and behaviours, which, ultimately contribute to improving organisational performance.

This is an original paper which makes a contribution by helping to address the dearth of studies which have explored aspects of the effectiveness of HRM in SMEs in China. In contrast to the majority of China-focussed studies on this topic, it highlights HRM outcomes at the individual level rather than the organisational level. Further, the study involves SMEs in western China which is an under-explored region.