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Fu, Chuqiong (2007) Case study: A study of the relationship between management style and job satisfaction in a Chinese culture context. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

Abstract

The main research purpose of this research study is to discover the relationship between management style and employee job satisfaction within a Chinese culture based rural township and village enterprises (TVEs). Furthermore, this study will also consider the effects of different demographic characteristics of different groups on the perceived management and job satisfaction from employees.

Management style is the approach by managers in dealing with the industrial relationship between management and labours. Job satisfaction is simply how happy an employee is to his/her job. It is the way how one feels as an employee of a company. There are several factors that could influence the level of employee job satisfaction. But what is important to this study is that there have been a number of studies have confirmed that the management style in an organization could have notable impacts on employees' job satisfaction. Management styles as different ways of managing the relationship between managers and employees could significantly affect the perception of employees about their job, therefore level of their job satisfaction. More than that, Hofstede (1980) has showed that the culture in a particular country could also have strong influences on people's behavior in that country. In an organizational context, this is reflected in a way of different employee expectations, behaviors and organizational structure and management style (Chen, 2001; Cheng, 1995).

This case study is based on a Chinese company which has long been strongly influenced by traditional Chinese culture. In addition, our target company has been chosen because this company is one of the township and village enterprises which have been believed to be the mainstream of the economic development since China has opened its markets to the rest of the world. Data were collected by using a survey research from 83 employees who were randomly selected from those who had worked for the company for more than one year with a male and female ratio approximately at 1:1. Selected employees were participated the study by measuring their job satisfaction level with Job Descriptive Index (JDI) questionnaire and perceived management style with Purcell's two dimension questionnaire.

The findings indicated that the perceived management style in this company has been predominated by paternalism style in individualism dimension with a perception percentage of 78% and adversarial style in collectivism dimension with a perception percentage of 55%. It was found that there was a strong positive relationship between employee development management style and job in general and there was a strong negative relationship between labor control and job in general. Fro collectivism dimension, a strong positive relationship was found between co-operative style and general job satisfaction. Moreover, demographic characteristics had been found with no influences on the perception of management style but had some impacts on job satisfaction and significant differences for general job satisfaction level had been found among groups with different age, educational level and years of experience.

However, these findings may only provide limited meaning for managers who seek to improve their employee satisfaction because the study was conducted with a relatively small size of samples due to the time limited. Moreover, the measurement of management style and job satisfaction could be problematic due to the subjectivity of people's feeling and the numerous influential factors could have been involved. But, by taking the cultural and some demographic influence into account, this study could still provide some insights towards the relationship between management style and job satisfaction, thus could be helpful for future researches in the this area.

Item Type:	Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Depositing User:	EP, Services
Date Deposited:	06 Mar 2008
Last Modified:	24 Jan 2018 13:40
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/21325

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