Abstract

In last two decades, a Chinese traditional concept-guanxi-has gained significant attention from scholars across the world (Zhang and Zhang, 2006). Guanxi is so unique and important in China thereby it can to some extent affect a company’s development. A significant amount of research has been conducted in this area investigating guanxi not only from an organizational perspective but also from an individual perspective. Furthermore, certain scholars have specifically studied several more specific dimensions such as supervisor-subordinate guanxi (Han and Altman, 2009), salesperson-customer guanxi (Wang and Wang, 2011) and so forth. However, little research interest was shown on an overall investigation of Chinese employees’ perception of guanxi around them within organizations; and the possible impacts of that perception on their life at work. In order to fill this research gap, the present study particularly investigated Chinese employees' own perception of guanxi on three different levels (employee-employee, employee-supervisor, and supervisor-supervisor) and their perception of quality of guanxi as well (IVs). The relationship between IVs and DVs (employees’ happiness, organizational commitment and work motivation) was tested. Due to the large number of conceptual facets of guanxi, the most appropriate independent variables were first obtained by performing a factor analysis. Then, the multiple regression analysis was conducted to test the relationship between those acquired independent variables and the dependent variable. This study mainly contributes to the existing literature by providing a thorough conceptual image of guanxi, particularly based on Chinese employees’ own perception. In addition, the primary practical implication of this study is to help managers better understand their employees’ life at work from a guanxi perspective. Finally, the limitations and future research directions were discussed as well.