Benefits Of Confucianism

Back to the traditional Chinese management system, or can be called management in Confucian context, the values permeate every aspects of the organizational behaviour. Confucianism is a philosophy of humanity. Relation, connection, interaction between persons are highly respected in order to achieve the harmony among employees. Confucianism also reinforced centralised authority and vertical hierarchical order by paternalistic management (Chung, Lee, & Jung, 1997; Lee, 1998).

Can be seen that the values of Confucius management system look similar with the Japanese. Indeed, Japanese also applied the traditional Confucius to its culture. However, the Confucius that applied in Chinese have been flexible in many times interpretation of their philosophy

This is linked to lead the long term benefits for the company because development and innovation must be done in every moment. It also can rise the employees motivation and gradually eliminate the poor-performed employees to focus on the potentials (Zhao, 2005; Xin and Pucik, 2006). Moreover, by doing promotion based on performance, every employee could develop their personal potential and if the potential has developed, they can realize their own value.

For the more details, this implied the ‘race-track’ model for the employees’ career development. The opportunities to be the best can be taken whenever the employee wants. It is an open competition. The best performer will be recognized and rewarded (Xin and Pucik, 2006). This kind of practice can be rare in Asian style management, however it is very common in western MNC’s. It resulted how successful Haier nowadays in the global market.

Combining the flexible Confucius with western style career development in the company’s management system brought a good

By the Haier’s case that explained above, why Haier has a very rapid development, yet the performance of Japanese companies which are settled already from long time ago has been declining because of the differences of collectivism in each culture. In the term of amae, collectivism implies an obligatory relationship. If a person do something to other, that person will indulge himself with expectation that the opponent is obliged to do something that the first person wants. It seems such an impolite if the opponent does not give any feedback - by doing something to the first person. Different with guanxi, the collective culture in this term explained as doing something together for career advancement. In the application of guanxi, individuals drive themselves to achieve their goals, or to “better their own situations” (Leana & Van Buren, 1999:539). In other words, guanxi is exploiting social capital for good, which benefits every single member in the social structure (Belliveau, O’Reilly & Wade, 1996; Burt, 1992, 1997; Kostova & Roth, 2003; Useem & Karabel, 1986). Even though the focus of guanxi is social capital, it gives more benefit for the individuals who done quanxi deliberately (individual achievement is more important) (Lin, 1999: