The Long March to an Innovative Culture: Development of Corporate Cultures in China from the 1990s Until Today

While companies in China are becoming increasingly innovative, they still havenot reached their full potential. Organizational culture is widely regarded as a keyto innovation success. Therefore, this chapter provides a literature review basedon several empirical studies on organizational culture conducted between 1996and 2013 in Chinese companies. This approach helps to develop a better understandingof development tendencies in Chinese companies and to identify organizationalcultural traits which boost innovation or hinder creativity. The resultsindicate that Chinese companies have started to embrace a rational strategic- andgoal-orientated market approach which positively enhanced their innovation capability by learning from competitors and conducting external informationresearch. However, creating change, organizational learning, and a strong customerfocus are considered to be of less importance by many companies, whichmay reduce the innovation capability significantly. Furthermore, Chinese nationalculture traits such as social harmony and face may lead to the avoidance ofproductive task conflicts and hence reduce the creativity of employees. AdditionallyChinese cultural traits such as hierarchy and bureaucracy can be majorbarriers for divergent thinking and experiment