Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources最新文献

The industrialized world's workforce is aging. China, as one of the important representative countries in the Asia-Pacific region, is also experiencing an aging trend. Older people are often viewed as inflexible and unwilling to proactively change their environment or themselves to some extent. Prior studies have also found a negative association between age and proactive behavior. Therefore, breaking this negative cycle of age and proactive behavior becomes significant for the literature on age and management practices regarding older employees. In this paper, we identified job variety as a critical boundary condition and suggested that it would moderate the relationship between age and future time perspective, ultimately affecting proactive behavior. Our model was tested using a multilevel and multisource sample including 36 managers and 193 employees in China. The results showed that when job variety is high, the negative relationship between age and behavior becomes nonsignificant. Further, the interaction between age and job variety influenced proactive behavior through individuals' future time perspective. By identifying the important role of job variety, our study contributes to human resource management interventions for the aging workforce in China and other Asia-Pacific countries.

This study experimentally investigates initial trust formation in the organizational context of an artificial intelligence (AI) system in human resource management (HRM). Drawing on social exchange theory and leader-member exchange theory, we identify factors that contribute to initial trust in AI through cognitive and affective processing from the perspective of employees in the Chinese context. An online survey (N = 426) was conducted with a 2 (explanation of AI: without vs with) × 2 (trust in leaders: low vs high) design. Our findings demonstrate that initial trust plays a crucial role in AI adoption, and a trustworthy leader increases employees' AI trust and intention to adopt. Providing AI's benefits and risks moderates initial trust and the pathway to adoption. Moreover, familiarity with AI's application in HRM and organizational collectivism is also beneficial. Our findings suggest that organizations should prioritize cultivating initial trust in AI with employee-oriented strategies, including trusted leadership and supportive training resources.

Although employee involvement is playing an increasingly important role in contemporary human resource management, the phenomenon of employee silence is prevalent in the workplace. This study examines how leader benevolence and authoritarianism, the two components of paternalistic leadership, affect employee silence in the Chinese context. Data from 415 employees nested in 42 workgroups provide evidence for a cross-level, three-way interaction between benevolent leadership and authoritarian leadership and employee collective identity predicting employee silence. Specifically, benevolent-authoritarian leadership predicts the lowest employee silence behavior when an employee holds a high level of collective identity. This three-way interaction effect is mediated by employee interpersonal justice. Our study extends the knowledge of employee voice/silence behavior in the Chinese cultural setting by shedding light on the role of leadership characteristics. To reduce employee silence, organizations should provide training to improve leaders' skills to balance authoritarianism with benevolence, as well as activate employees' collective identity to further enhance the effectiveness of paternalistic management.

The wage gap between people with disabilities (PWD) and people without disabilities (PWOD), which discourages PWD from entering the labor market, is attributed to two factors: productivity differences and discrimination effects. To determine whether PWD in China face wage discrimination in the labor market and which factor contributes more to the disability-related wage gap in China, this study uses Chinese Household Income Project data (years 2007 and 2013) to estimate disability-related wage discrimination, decomposing the wage gap between PWD and PWOD using the Oaxaca-Blinder and Neumark approach. The findings demonstrate the presence of disability-related discrimination in China, accounting for approximately 38.9%–52.4% of the wage gap between PWD and PWOD. Unobservable productivity effects contribute more to the wage gap than does disability-related discrimination. Male PWD living in rural areas and less educated people are more likely to experience wage discrimination in China. Moreover, individuals with disabilities in rural areas experience significant disability-related discrimination, whereas no such phenomenon is observed in urban or migrant populations. Future human resource management policies should consider antidiscrimination measures and improve the productivity of PWD, including providing reasonable accommodation for PWD in the workplace and ensuring equality in job searches and employment.

Enterprises have sought to explore appropriate human resource practices to cope with sustainability problems caused by increasingly severe environmental pollution and the imbalance of interest among multiple stakeholders. Our study tries to address this issue by systematically conceptualizing the construct of green-harmonious human resource practice (GH-HRP) and exploring how and when GH-HRP promotes employee organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In Study 1, we develop a four-dimension, 16-item GH-HRP scale including green-harmonious selection, responsibility consciousness development, harmonious win-win compensation, and green-harmonious activity participation. In Study 2, using three-wave data from 390 supervisor-employee dyads, we find that GH-HRP facilitates employee OCB through the mediating role of duty orientation and meaning of work. Further, ethical leadership moderates the positive effects of GH-HRP on duty orientation and meaning of work such that these effects are more pronounced when ethical leadership is high, thus fostering employees' engagement in OCB. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

This paper critically examines the notion of working time flexibility of platform takeaway riders and its impact on them in China. Drawing on 25 interviews with platform and takeaway delivery company managers and takeaway riders as well as secondary data, the study finds that the management model adopted by the platform companies and their agency companies often encourages riders to extend their working hours by being designed into the rider's earning system, status level and various incentive schemes. Driven by profits, takeaway delivery platform companies pursue speed and impose harsh punishments for poor customer reviews. Severe competition and the platforms' aggressive pricing and commissioning practices mean that takeaway riders' remuneration is tightly squeezed, with no subsidies or overtime payment, and with rules for bonuses that make it increasingly difficult to earn. Working excessively long and intense hours is the only way that riders can increase their income, which suggests that rider-oriented working time flexibility is virtually non-existent. We propose the notion of fragmented employment relationships and fragmented working time to conceptualise working time flexibility in the takeaway delivery context in China. We accentuate the need to examine the quality of working time flexibility when examining this practice. We call for state interventions to provide a greater level of social protection than the takeaway riders are currently experiencing to advance the decent work agenda as part of the Sustainable Development Goals.