BUS603: Managing People

Data Collection Procedure

Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS) is the first nationwide, comprehensive, and continuous academic survey in China. CGSS system collects data from multiple levels of society, community, family, and individual, summarizes the trends of social change, and dives into topics of major scientific and practical significance.

Similar to former surveys, the CGSS sampling method in 2015 adopted a multi-stage, stratified probability sampling design, which, at the level of village, employed the sampling method based on map addresses that has been generally recognized by large-scale domestic social and economic surveys. The 2015 CGSS field survey put to use the Ominisurvey questionnaire survey system for the first time, drastically raising the timeliness and quality of data collection. The survey covered 478 villages in 28 provinces/cities/autonomous regions across China and completed 10,968 valid personal questionnaires.

In addition to the core module, the 2015 CGSS project also included the work module of East Asian Social Survey (EASS), which had an average probability of 1/6. The EASS work module in CGSS 2015 was applied to analyze the relationship between P-E fit and employee creativity and completed a total of 1,743 valid questionnaires. As P-E fit questions in the data were only for non-agricultural workers, this study chose samples of "currently engaged in non-agricultural work" for analysis according to the work experience in the questionnaire. After removing the cases with missing data, a number of 543 valid questionnaires were obtained.

Measurement

Person-Environment Fit

P-E fit measurement contains direct measurement and indirect measurement. Direct measurement is conducted by the fit degree perceived by the individual, such as "My abilities meet the needs of organizational development"; while indirect measurement includes crossover and individual methods. The former involves the measurement of two objects – the individual and the organization, as well as the statistics of fit degree; the latter uses different questioning methods to put questions only to the individual, such as "I often have new ideas" and "My company is filled with dense innovation atmosphere," and then analyzes the match between individual creativity and organizational creativity atmosphere.

Both direct and indirect measurement has pros and cons. Indirect measurement can produce a separate and meaningful demonstration of the internal psychological process of comparison between the person and the environment. However, it is possible that people who make intuitive judgments about a subject rather than going through a process of actual comparison and the subject in question. In comparison, though failing to discriminate between independent effects of the individual and the environment and subject to potential response bias, direct measurement can obtain unique information that indirect measurement cannot, and in fact it has been considered more effective than indirect measurement. This study thus employs the direct measurement of P-E fit. This measurement method means that employees directly report the level of matching they perceive; moreover, in whatever circumstances, the matching is achieved as long as the individual perceives it.

The indicators for the measurement of demands-abilities fit are: "Whether you think the education you received matches the needs of your current job" and "Whether you think the skills you gained match the needs of your current job". Options for the questions are cross-combined to form "Both fit," "Either fit," and "Neither fit".

For the measurement of needs-supplies fit, it has been divided into two categories of internality and externality by its nature. The conclusion on the relationship between internality fit and creativity is relatively consistent, whereas that on between externality fit and creativity is not. To verify the relationship between externality fit and employee creativity, this study attaches more importance to externality fit without regard to internality fit for the time being. The questionnaire developed a five-item index (α = 0.930) to obtain participants' self-reported assessments of their needs-supplies fit. Sample items were "From the perspective of work skills, do you think your company offers you a reasonable salary" "From the perspective of job performance, do you think your company offers you a reasonable salary".

Employee Creativity

Former studies have defined creativity as outcome-oriented or process-oriented. Researchers like Amabile tend to adopt the "outcome-oriented" definition. They define creativity as the creation of newfangled and useful ideas or opinions related to product, service, and process. By contrast, researchers like Parnes are prone to adopt the "process-oriented" definition. They define creativity as a process in which employees attempt to create new outcomes from behavior, cognition, and emotion, and concentrate on the individual's creative behavior in complicated situations. In accordance with the orientation of creative process measurement, this study defines employee creativity as the creative behavior of employees when solving problems in daily life as well as work situations.

From the angle of measurement, the measurement of creativity includes subjective evaluation and objective measurement. Subjective evaluation includes self-evaluation, expert evaluation, and superior evaluation; while objective measurement involves patent disclosures, technical reports, and ideas submitted to suggestion programs. Although each measurement method has its own pros and cons, this study applies the method of employee self-evaluation to measure employee creativity. The reasons are: (1) the employee's knowledge of job information and perception of their own behavioral motives are more delicate than their superiors; (2) the creativity assessment is highly susceptible to the preference of evaluators, bringing about various understandings and thus vast differences in evaluation results; (3) the superior assessment is easily induced or blinded by the surface behavior of employees good at performance, however, superiors turn a blind eye to the truly creative behavior of some honest employees. In addition, previous research has focused on the creativity of employees in the face of specific tasks; whereas this study focuses on the creativity of employees in entire workdays, which can be either the creativity in a particular task at work or the creativity in addressing daily problems.

The questionnaire developed a five-item index (α = 0.720) to obtain participants' self-reported assessments of employee creativity. Sample items were "I often like to try new unusual things" and "When learning new things, I prefer to try my own unique method".

Multicultural Experience

Multicultural experience implies the opportunity to communicate directly or indirectly with foreign cultural elements or members. It consists of big multicultural experience and little multicultural experience. The former denotes years of experience of living abroad or emigration and thus in-depth comprehension of and exchanges with foreign cultural elements; however, the latter indicates foreign cultural elements exposed to daily life other than emigration or living abroad, for example, the experience of people who have not gone abroad learning foreign languages and watching American dramas. Previous studies have laid emphasis on big multicultural experience rather than little multicultural experience. Yet, in today's globalization, people have more opportunities and easier access to foreign cultural elements, such as language learning, media reading, cultural activities, and consumer behavior, hence little multicultural experience deserves more concern and thus the focus of this study. Since bilingualism is a pivotal indicator for measuring little multicultural experience, bilingual immersion can develop the individual's multicultural identity and promote them to better comprehend multiculturalism, which is a tool to measure multicultural experience. Bilingualism in the article refers to the two languages of Chinese and English. Due to a large number of dialects in China, the dialects will no longer be subdivided here, but Mandarin and dialects are considered as a whole. The English ability hence represents the level of bilingualism. The questionnaire developed a five-item index (α = 0.966) to measure employees' bilingualism. Sample items were "What do you think of your English listening ability?" and "What do you think of your English speaking ability?". The higher the total score is, the stronger the bilingual ability, and the richer the multicultural experience. Variables description is shown in Table 1.

TABLE 1. Descriptive variables (N = 543).