A situational analysis of Chinese managers’ personal value systems (PVS) and their influence on employee commitment

This thesis investigates how the personal value systems of executive teams in privately owned Chinese companies influence their organisation’s prospects for sustainable competitive success. The research aim is to establish a relationship between managerial value systems, corporate culture, P-O fit and affective employee commitment. The research theory is based on an extensive and rigorous literature review. It was tested in an empirical study composed of semi-structured interviews and quantitative research for which a new research tool has been created, consisting of England’s (1967b) Personal Values Questionnaire (PVQ), Cameron and Quinn’s (1999) Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), Posner et al.’s (1985) Shared Values Scale and Meyer and Allen’s (1991) Affective Commitment Scale. The present study contributes to the existing knowledge base by testing and validating this instrument for research in China. It takes stock of the currently prevailing hierarchy of personal values among executive managers, and establishes a relationship between the identified value preferences and types of organisational culture, as well as between the strength of such systems and levels of employee-organisation value congruency and affective employee commitment. It was further found that in the majority of sample firms both executive management teams and employees characterised their corporate culture as multi-dimensional