Abstract
While companies in China are becoming increasingly innovative, they still have not reached their full potential. Organizational culture is widely regarded as a key to innovation success. Therefore, this chapter provides a literature review based on several empirical studies on organizational culture conducted between 1996 and 2013 in Chinese companies. This approach helps to develop a better understanding of development tendencies in Chinese companies and to identify organizational cultural traits which boost innovation or hinder creativity. The results indicate that Chinese companies have started to embrace a rational strategic- and goal-orientated market approach which positively enhanced their innovation capability by learning from competitors and conducting external information research. However, creating change, organizational learning, and a strong customer focus are considered to be of less importance by many companies, which may reduce the innovation capability significantly. Furthermore, Chinese national culture traits such as social harmony and face may lead to the avoidance of productive task conflicts and hence reduce the creativity of employees. Additionally Chinese cultural traits such as hierarchy and bureaucracy can be major barriers for divergent thinking and experiments.
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Schilcher, S., Kasper, H. (2019). The Long March to an Innovative Culture: Development of Corporate Cultures in China from the 1990s Until Today. In: Foo, CT. (eds) Handbook of Chinese Management. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2442-9_47-1
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The Long March to an Innovative Culture: Development of Corporate Cultures in China from the 1990s Until Today- Published:
- 25 March 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2442-9_47-2
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The Long March to an Innovative Culture: Development of Corporate Cultures in China from the 1990s Until Today- Published:
- 30 October 2018
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2442-9_47-1