"China, we have a workplace problem" by Gallup

Gallup published a provocative article about China's low workforce engagement one year ago.

In 2013, 6% of Chinese people reported being engaged at their jobs and about 26% were actively disengaged.

To put that into perspective, the U.S. workforce is about 30% engaged and about 20% actively disengaged.

China, we have a workplace problem.

 

Command-and-control management doesn't work anymore

If you were to ask me what the most dangerous state of mind in China is right now, I'd say that it's active disengagement in the workplace because it's so widespread. The cause of disengagement in China is the same as it is in every workplace around the world: The workers despise their immediate boss. And the reason they hate their boss is because the wrong person was hired to be the boss. It's that simple.

How does this happen? Well, I know just enough about the Chinese workplace to know that control is of enormous cultural importance. The type of people who are named "boss" in China command and control their "underlings," and those underlings do as they're told. People are not named manager for their ability to engage and develop employees.

But this command-and-control approach doesn't work in the new global workplace, where employees demand more autonomy and want more freedom of thought and action and to be more empowered and engaged. Old top-down management, the type that's entrenched in China, just doesn't work anymore.

 

China's national workforce will be transformed -- becoming highly productive and engaged -- when its organizations hire and develop managers who inspire employees to give high scores on these items.

These are the 12 most important, and most predictive, workplace elements Gallup has discovered. China's societal advancement -- or collapse -- lies within these elements, as employee engagement boosts productivity, quality, customer engagement, retention, safety, and profitability.

 

 

It would be wise for all Chinese executives and managers to consider how they can deliver on these simple yet transformational demands of the workplace. If Chinese leaders were to change their current spectacularly bad nationwide score of 6% engaged workers to 20% engaged workers, the country would be a completely different place -- one with a much brighter, more stable future.

China must stop choosing the wrong people to manage!

 

Again a voluntaristic (and typically American) call for change, as if  deeply-rooted cultural features could easily be shifted for the sake of good management...

When Are Chinese Employees More Likely to Speak Up? Is participative management conceivable in Chinese firms?

An interesting field research by the famous Taiwanese sociologist Farh Jiing-Lih's team was led in a sample of 73 local companies in Zhejiang. It found that only 27 percent of the Chinese firms instituted employee participation systems. Approximately 60 percent of the employees reported they did not speak up frequently, and around 28 percent of the employees did not make any suggestions at all.

Voice content can be characterized as being “promotive” or “prohibitive”. Whereas promotive voice expresses new ideas for improvement in the work unit or organization, prohibitive voice expresses concerns about work practices, incidents or employee behaviors that are harmful to the organization.

Speaking up about work issues is viewed as a threat to organizational harmony and a challenge to leaders’ authority. The notion of "face" is not mentioned in this article where psychological terms are prefered. However we could also say that voice is threatening for peers' faces and manager's face.

Because voice is a voluntary and discretionary behavior, it cannot be easily designed into formal job requirements and is largely dependent on employee personal initiatives. 
I do disagree with the former statement: I strongly recommend French firms I provide HR consulting service with to set up "feedback ability" as a very important and rewarded KPI.
Many studies (including mine) have demonstrated that participative management techniques do not work well in China. Even if Western firms' Chinese employees are given opportunities to participate in decision making, they may still choose to withhold their voice and stay silent.

That is whay they should concretely be encouraged to do so.

These findings suggest that voice is highest when multiple psychological motivations – particularly felt obligation and psychological safety – were simultaneously present. That is to say when the relationships (reciprocal trust and exchange of services called guanxi) are good enough to make sure Face won't be lost.

Therefore, managers working in China need to understand the psychological factors (that is to say: the face logic) that either facilitate or prevent employees from speaking up. Our research suggests that managers can create a favorable environment for both promotive and prohibitive forms of employee voice by demonstrating an open attitude toward employees’ ideas and providing favorable interpersonal environment for voice (to enhance psychological safety), reminding employees that they are valued membersof the organization and capable of valuable input (to increase organization-based self-esteem), and caring their employees and emphasizing that employees can give back to the organization by making suggestions and pointing out ineffective processes (to increase felt obligations). 
This is exactly what we advocate during our "Managing a Chinese Team" trainings where leaders experience how they can adapt their management style to the Chinese employees' values and expectations.

However the challenge is huge for Chinese managers who usually are not convinced about the benefits of participative practices. Even if the article's authors advise them to change: Chinese managers need to be very cautious about their authoritarian behaviors if they hope to receive intellectual inputs from their employees, it might not be sufficient to make them put their education, beliefs into question. How useless are voluntaristic injunctions found in standard leadership trainings: just do it! They can be intellectually convinced. However in daily operations, what is bred in the bone comes out in the flesh: topdown management practices are merely encouraged and confirmed by Chinese authoritarian environment. Ask any Chinese manager about staff's participation to decisions-making: he/she will tell you "this is good in the West, but not in China." 
According my experience, only the Chinese managers who got deeply accultured during a lifetime and real management experience in the West can change their mindset and style, provided they get some coaching support to be able to analyze their change process.

 http://www.iacmr.org/v2en/CMI/Vol3Issue1/eCMI_7.pdf Abstract based on the full article, “Psychological Antecedents of Promotive and Prohibitive Voice: A Two-Wave Examination,” Academy of Management Journal, Vol. 55, 2012.