This study examines how cultural values (i.e., individualism and collectivism) and personality (i.e., self-perceived superiority and exhibitionism) jointly affect self-rating among Chinese respondents from mainland China (N= 161), Hong Kong (N= 350), and Taiwan (N= 398). The results demonstrated that respondents with a more individualistic cultural orientation exhibit greater leniency in self-rating than those with a more collectivistic cultural orientation. Furthermore, self-perceived superiority and exhibitionism are related to high self-ratings among individuals who expressed low individualism values, but not among individuals who expressed high individualism or collectivism values. The results suggest that self-rating research needs to take both the individual's cultural values and personality traits into account.

Although gender-based division of labour and the identity theory of stress suggest that the relationship between work and family demands and life stress may vary as a function of gender, it is largely unknown whether these arguments are also valid in China. To address this gap in the existing literature, the current study investigates the gender differences in perceived work and family demands, and the effects of these perceived demands on the life stress of Chinese male and female employees. The study of 153 married Chinese employees found that Chinese women perceived a higher level of family demands than did Chinese men, whereas there was no significant gender difference in the perception of work demands. In addition, while perceived family demands were similarly related to life stress differently for men and women, perceived work demands were associated more strongly with the life stress of men than that of women.

Findings based on 186 teams involving 689 employees, working in twelve Chinese state-owned factories in three cities, indicated that a cooperative in contrast to a competitive approach was related to perceived team effectiveness, as measured by both team managers and team members. The role of conflict types for team effectiveness, on the other hand, is ambiguous. Furthermore, conflict management approaches affect team perceptions of relational and task conflict. Results suggest that a cooperative conflict management approach may be equally useful for Chinese work teams, as it is for teams in the Western context.

Performance appraisal has been the focus of considerable research for almost a century. Yet, this research has resulted in very few specific recommendations about designing and implementing appraisal and performance management systems whose goal is performance improvement. We believe that a reason for this is that appraisal research became too interested in measurement issues and not interested enough in ways to improve performance, although some recent trends in the area have begun moving the field in the right direction. We review these trends and their genesis, and propose a motivational framework as a means of integrating what we have learned and generating proposals for future research that focus on employee's performance improvement.

We consider Chinese cultural, psychological and social factors that are likely to place boundaries on the applicability of DeNisi and Pritchard's motivational framework and discuss how these cultural barriers play out at each of the links in their model. We conclude with a summary and a discussion of some of the broader implications of applying models of work motivation to a Chinese economy in transition.