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Examining the positive and negative effects of guanxi practices: A multi-level analysis of guanxi practices and procedural justice perceptions

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Abstract

In this research, we compared and contrasted the effects of managers’ interpersonal level guanxi practice and group level guanxi practice on employees’ procedural justice perceptions. Results indicated that interpersonal guanxi practice was associated with increased employee fairness perceptions whereas group level guanxi practice (the sense that guanxi is used often to make human resource decisions within a management group) was negatively related to perceived fairness. Thus, while individuals may like the personal favors of managers’ interpersonal guanxi practice, their sense of justice is undermined by the broad use of guanxi. In addition, group level guanxi practice moderated the relationship between interpersonal guanxi practice and procedural justice such that this relationship was stronger in work units with high levels of group level guanxi practice. Thus, when employees see many others affected by guanxi, their sense of justice is even more strongly influenced by interpersonal guanxi practice.

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Notes

  1. For the cross-level interaction—the effect of group level guanxi practice on the slope of interpersonal guanxi practice on procedural justice—we did some extra analysis as recommended by Hofmann and Gavin (1998). Hofmann and Gavin (1998) demonstrated that grand-mean centering in the presence of cross-level interactions can sometimes produce misleading results. In order to verify that the grand-mean centered estimation of the cross-level interaction in the present study was not misleading, we examined an additional model using grand-mean centering for “interpersonal level guanxi practice” at level 1. At level 2, we included the work unit level “interpersonal level guanxi practice” × group level guanxi practice to control for the between-group interaction. The between-group interaction was not significant. The result for the cross-level interaction in the group-mean centered model was similar to the one in Model 2, Table 3 (γ = .11, p < 05).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, 401 21st Ave. South, Nashville, TN, 37203, USA

    Ying Chen & Ray Friedman

  2. School of Management, North China Electric Power University, Being, China

    Enhai Yu

  3. School of Management, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

    Fubin Sun

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  1. Ying Chen
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Correspondence to Ying Chen.

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Chen, Y., Friedman, R., Yu, E. et al. Examining the positive and negative effects of guanxi practices: A multi-level analysis of guanxi practices and procedural justice perceptions. Asia Pac J Manag 28, 715–735 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-009-9176-x

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