X. C. JIANG ET AL.
582
to traditional Chinese culture that encourages male rather than
female to contribute to society and country. Furthermore, Chi-
nese female’s self-awareness just began to wake up, they strive
to the equity between female and male as soon as possible, so
they would like to place more emphasis on the rewards of work
than males do.
There was a significant negative relationship between age
and material condition (r = −0.12, p < .01) and self-realization
(r = −0.12, p < .01) (see Table 2). Furthermore, comparing
younger participants (less than 30 years old) and older partici-
pant (more than 30 years old), we found that younger partici-
pants place more emphasized on material condition (t = 2.36, p
< .05) and self-realization (t = 2.60, p < .01) than older practi-
tioners did (see Table 3). Because of different living and work
experiences, younger people are more susceptible to material-
ism and individualism and experience more intense self-
awareness than elder people. Consequently, younger people
want to achieve greater material and psychological rewards
form their work than elder people do. Furthermore, most of
younger people are single children. They are the “little suns” of
their families. Therefore, they want their work environment to
be both materially and psychology fulfilling.
Hierarchical levels influenced material conditions (F = 17.62,
p < .001) and self-realization (F = 4.05, p < .01) substantially.
Ascending the hierarchical level, business practitioners place
more stress on self-realization and less on material conditions.
High-level employees generally have better material conditions
than low-level employees. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs theory, they are tend to value self-realization more than
material conditions.
Regressing organizational performance on work values, sta-
tistically controlling the effects of gender, age, tenure, hierar-
chical level, and organizational size, we found that with an
increase in organizational performance, employees placed less
emphasis on material conditions (B = −0.09, p < .05). Employ-
ees working in companies with higher organizational perform-
ance would have better working conditions and material bene-
fits. Thus, they would express less desire for material condi-
tions. Finally, organizational size did not impact work values
substantially.
As in any empirical study, our project has limitations. First,
the issue of social desirability might be a concern. As previous
research, we ask participants to judge importance of every
items, then participants might have thought some kinds of work
values were important only because they believed these items
Table 4.
Predictors of work values.
Material
conditions Self-realization Social
harmony
Prosperous
development
Age −0.10* −0.19** −0.08 −0.04
Gender 0.10** 0.11** 0.05 0.04
Tenure 0.06 0.05 0.08 0.03
Hierarchical
level −0.19** 0.15** −0.01 −0.01
Organizational
size 0.03 0.06 −0.03 0.05
Organizational
performance −0.09* 0.00 −0.01 −0.05
Note: *p < 0.05, **p < 0.01. All the coefficients are standardized regression
coefficient.
are socially correct. Second, the sample of this study is a con-
ventional one. However, our sample size was very large, en-
suring a diverse and representative sample. In future, we should
use more valid methods to measure work values and get more
random samples.
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