When East meets West: Interaction effects of organisational ownership structure, gender and (un)met expectations on workers' attitudes in China

This study adopts a framework of structural contingency and gender theories in a case-study-based investigation of changes in workers' attitudes towards their jobs and employers when working for enterprises with alliances with varying degrees of closeness to Western partners (equity joint venture- and contract joint venture [CJV]-type alliances). Workers moving from non-foreign-invested enterprise (FIE) to FIE employment perceived their enterprise FIEs to have more HR practices, and their attitudes towards their jobs and companies became moderately more positive. There were, however, limited differences by alliance type. This was explained by the intervening role of gender in the relationship between structure and attitudes, producing the unexpected result that CJV women experienced the least positive change in their attitudes, a finding the authors explained utilising (un)met expectation theory.