The Circumstances And Human Resource Management Reforms Within The State-owned Commercial Banks In China: Facts And Empirical Explanations

This thesis analysis the relationship hypotheses between the circumstances, or environmental factors and human resource practices with the reforms of human resource management within the Chinese state-owned commercial banks (SOCBs), from the perspective of strategic human resource management (SHRM). It aims to provide some clues for the forthcoming reforms of the human resource management within the Chinese SOCBs. It firstly summarizes the practices of human resources management in the SOCBs, which the past researches failed to refine, as well as the target of the HR practices, which is defined as to contribute to the banks'performance.SHRM suggests that HR practices are most efficient with strategic goals of organizations. This thesis is also designed the interviews and surveys of the employees in the SOCBs, regarding the possibility and potentiality that the HR practices might contribute to the strategies and management of the SOCBs. It is suggested that lacking the orientation of the strategies within any SOCBs among the four bank groups, HR practices are affected a lot by their environmental factors, such as government's influence, employees'skills, banks organizational structures instead of the strategies. Therefore, the aim of the HR reforms among these banks is to fit to the contextual factors as listed above. Furthermore, this thesis also proposes some policies which SOCBs could adopt and carry out in their coming reforms on HR practices, according to the requirements and demands from their environmental factors. This thesis consists of 5 chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction, which illustrates the research background, purpose, methodology, and processes. Chapter 2 is the review of the related literature to the HRM of the commercial banks. This part has also summarized the constitution of HR practices, which are job design, recruitment and selection, staffing, training, performance evaluation, incentive pay, promotion, etc. Besides, it combines the empirical and theoretic research result of the SHRM to analysis the relationship between the banks strategy and HR practices, the HR practices and banks performance. It turns to that, the HR practices of the SOCBs should meet the demands of the banks employees, of the government, and the other external environmental factors.Since it is unlikely that a single theory on organizational behavior can ascertain all relevant influential contextual factors or determinants of the HR practices, Chapter 3 conducts a comprehensive review of four different theoretical perspectives on HR related circumstances: the resource-based perspective, the behavioral perspective, transaction cost perspective, and the institutional approach. Following, it is presented a framework on the HR practices within the SOCBs, which is based on a combination of insights from these four theoretical perspectives. The interview and survey to the banks employees have been applied to test and ascertain these determinants summarized from the above mentioned perspectives. Various contextual variables as determinants of the HR practices, including employees'skills, the requirements of the higher educational departments, the influence and attendance of the central government etc., have been identified by both the theoretical and empirical researches.To test these factors and relationship hypothesis, the data obtained from a questionnaire survey amongst the SOCBs has been utilized. This survey, which is discussed in the section on the research method, resulted in data on almost 3 listed SOCBs in China with 60 employees. The SPSS 13.0 software is used to test the hypotheses. The main conclusions are presented in Chapter 4. Amongst others, it is found that, within the sample of SOCBs, employees'skills and commitment to the banks are the most influential factors to the HR practices. However, once the contextual variables are taken into account, the influence with governments and HR center which is the functional department of the SOCBs are roughly halved. Various environmental factors impact different HR practices with distinct HR output and bank output.The final part proposes the HR reforms to the SOCBs according to the extent of each identified environmental factors, in order to fit the environments, and finally contribute to the management and banks performance in the competitive circumstances. It also proposes the further research agenda for those who concentrate on the HRM and reforms of the SOCBs in China.