| China has entered a period of frequent industrial conflicts,and labor dispute cases are still high.The normalization of the COVID-19 and the development of new forms of employment have further increased labor conflicts.Employee grievances are the safety valve of labor conflicts and the key to the source management of labor relations.Research on employee grievances has started early in foreign countries and a lot of studies have been conducted.However,compared with the comprehensive employee grievance process in Western countries,Chinese enterprises commonly lack a comprehensive employee grievance process,and the function of enterprise labor union to defend rights is weakened,the power of employer and labor is not equal,and under the pattern of strong employer and weak labor,grievance processing depends on the manager.What are the characteristics of employee grievance processing strategies in Chinese management practice? What are the effects of these strategies? These questions need to be answered.This paper analyzes interviews with 328 employees using grounded theory and constructs a model of employee grievance processing strategies and their effects in the Chinese context,and presents it quantitatively using content analysis.The study found that: grievance processing in the Chinese context depends on managers’ leadership art,and there are seven types of handling strategies,namely retaliation,coercion,avoidance,persuasion,compromise,cooperation and concession,which can be classified into organizational interest-oriented strategy,interest balance-oriented strategy and employee interest-oriented strategy by combining with industrial relations balance theory;Employee grievance processing is a dynamic process,and as employees continue to appeal,the processing strategy in the new stage may change compared with the previous one,showing two tendencies of more protecting the organization’s interests and more protecting employees’ interests,and as the grievance stage develops,the possibility of the organization making certain concessions increases;different processing strategies lead to different effects,and the use of interest balance-oriented strategy and employee interest-oriented strategy can effectively resolve grievances,the use of organizational interest-oriented strategy is not conducive to grievance resolution and leads to employee tolerance,employee turnover,and even grievance spillover.This study extends the study of employee grievances and finds that grievance processing in the Chinese context differs from the procedural and institutionalized approach in Western countries,that Chinese managers have more discretionary power and thus the processing strategies are closer to conflict management,and also identifies two strategies,reprisal and persuasion,that are unique in the Chinese context.Based on the findings,it is recommended that enterprises should establish formal grievance procedures to resolve labor disputes internally in the common interest of both parties when processing grievances. |
