It is with great excitement that I present this new issue of MOR to you because it provides a glimpse of our new mission – providing ground-breaking insights into Chinese management research and comparable global contexts. The articles published in this issue include a variety of rigorously conducted research, for example, a meta-analytic study on team faultlines, and papers that propose new constructs deeply rooted in Chinese culture, such as moral star and intangibility gap. Moreover, there is also a perspective paper offering foresights on the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in Asian versus Western cultures, and a set of debate papers on the well-known phenomenon of Chinese guanxi in the Middle East.
The issue opens with a perspective paper (Yam et al., 2023) that proposes three frameworks – historical, religious, and exposure – to explain why Asians might be more accepting of machines than their Western counterparts, as reflected in the number of robots used (especially in terms of three exciting human–machine applications: sex robot, clergy robot, robot therapist) in Asian countries compared to Western countries. The authors' discussions are provocative yet with sound logic, and I hope new research ideas will emerge after you read this paper.
Following the perspective paper, a review paper using meta-analytic techniques (Zhang & Chen, 2023) studied the negative effects of faultlines on team performance by distinguishing between surface-level, deep-level, and between social and task faultlines, which revealed two distinct serial mediators – subgroup formation and team interaction quality that directly affected team performance. In the paper entitled ‘Fighting the talent war’, Zhang et al. (2023) found that talent inducement was positively related to team member work engagement, which had a positive relationship with team and member job creativity, although such relationship was strengthened by individual learning-goal orientation but weakened by one's performance goal orientation.
In the article that explored the notion of moral star, Liu et al. (2023) defined it as the employee (not the team leader) who exhibits disproportionately high and prolonged morality relative to others and has a reputation of being moral in his or her team. They found that the effects of moral stars on non-stars' felt moral responsibility and prosocial behavior depended on their own level of moral identity: positive with high-moral but negative with low-moral identity non-stars. Moreover, Lu et al. (2023) demonstrated that the extent to which team member helping behavior would enhance work–goal progress, which negatively related to work–family conflict, was contingent on their goal interdependence: cooperative or competitive.
Gu et al. (2023) advanced a coopetition perspective to argue that an intangibility gap – the difference in intangible asset intensity between industry-frontier foreign firms and local firms – would generate both competitive threats and cooperative opportunities for local firms. Using a sample of manufacturing firms in China, they found that the intangibility gap has an inverted U-shaped relationship with internal R&D intensity of local firms such that a moderate intangibility gap was more likely to stimulate local firms' R&D than a small or large intangibility gap. Meanwhile, Zhang et al. (2023) explored the transmission mechanisms of corporate fraud and its punishments within social network communities in China and revealed two effects: the peer-concealing effect decreases the likelihood of being detected when committing fraud, for those with more and closer fraudulent peers; whereas the peer-hinting effect increases the likelihood of being detected when committing fraud, for those with more and closer punished peers.
Finally, in the DDD section, one commentary (Horak et al., 2023) questioned the use of guanxi in a wasta environment in a previously published paper on how guanxi networks helped hotel business in the Middle East (Eid et al., 2022). The original authors then responded to this commentary to offer their explanations (Eid et al., 2023). We highly welcome our readers to actively join such debate, for this stream of research, and beyond.
With gratitude,
Xiao-Ping
