Family-like company culture in the Chinese context: scale development, validation, and its behavioral implications

Abstract

Family-Like Company Culture (FLCC) is a localized form of organizational culture deeply rooted in traditional Chinese ethical philosophy. It embodies the Confucian ideal of xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, ping tianxia (修身、齐家、治国、平天下), meaning self-cultivation, family regulation, state governance, and bringing peace to all under heaven. Drawing upon core Confucian values such as ren (仁, benevolence), yi (义, righteousness), li (礼, propriety), xiao (孝, filial piety), and de (德, virtue), FLCC treats the enterprise as a family and promotes compassion, moral responsibility, interpersonal harmony, and the shared flourishing of both employees and the organization. FLCC emphasizes not only internal care and moral development for employees but also extends its cultural responsibility to external domains. It advocates care and accountability toward customers, communities, society, and the natural environment. This practice reflects the cultural logic of jiaguo yiti (家国一体, the unity of family and state) and the moral aspiration of jianji tianxia (兼济天下, working for the common good beyond the self). Through this perspective, the organization becomes a warm and responsible collective that supports employee growth while actively contributing to social welfare and the building of a harmonious society. Despite its growing presence in management practice, FLCC remains underdeveloped in scholarly research, particularly in terms of conceptual clarity, empirical measurement, and explanatory mechanisms. This dissertation addresses these critical gaps through a three-study design aimed at systematically conceptualizing, measuring, and empirically testing FLCC and its effects on employee performance.

Study 1 focuses on analyzing and synthesizing how exemplary firms in the Chinese context practice Family-Like Company Culture, and on this basis develops a dual mechanism practice framework to reveal the internal linkages among these mechanisms and the concrete practical outcomes they generate. Drawing on grounded theory methodology, the author conducted field visits to selected sample firms and carried out in-depth interviews with senior executives, middle managers, and frontline employees through both online and offline approaches. Through open coding, axial coding, and theoretical coding, a dual mechanism practice framework was developed, consisting of two interrelated cultural mechanisms: internal integration and external adaptation. Internal integration refers to cultural practices that foster emotional bonding, moral cultivation, and a shared sense of identity among organizational members, whereas external adaptation involves extending familial ethics to broader external organizational relationships, giving rise to corresponding practical orientations in customer relations, social responsibility, stakeholder collaboration, and ecological sustainability. This framework suggests that FLCC is not merely a rhetorical metaphor or a surface level value system, but rather a deeply embedded cultural logic rooted in Confucian ethics and systematically translated into management practices through moral edification, humanistic care, and collective responsibility. Overall, Study 1 lays an important theoretical foundation for the subsequent scale development, structural validation, and examination of the impact mechanisms in later studies.

Study 2 develops and validates a multi-dimensional scale for measuring FLCC in the Chinese organizational context. Based on qualitative data from open-ended questionnaires (n = 30), semi-structured interviews (n = 30), media content, and internal documents of exemplary FLCC firms, an initial item pool was generated and refined through expert review. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on 378 employee responses produced a five-factor structure with 20 items. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) on an independent sample of 215 employees further supported the scale’s reliability and validity. This study offers the first empirically grounded instrument for FLCC, addressing a fundamental gap in organizational culture measurement in China.

Study 3 develops and tests a serial mediation model linking FLCC to organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) through organizational identification and perceived insider status, drawing on social identity theory, self-categorization theory, and an identity internalization perspective. Data were collected from 232 matched employee-supervisor dyads in Chinese organizations characterized by strong family-like cultural practices. Employees reported FLCC, organizational identification, and perceived insider status, while supervisors rated employees’ OCB. Regression and bootstrapping analyses were used to test the proposed hypotheses. The results show that FLCC positively predicts organizational identification, which in turn positively predicts perceived insider status. Perceived insider status, however, negatively predicts supervisor-rated OCB. In addition, neither the total effect nor the direct effect of FLCC on supervisor-rated OCB is significant. The indirect effect through organizational identification alone is not significant, whereas the indirect effect through perceived insider status is significant and negative. The serial indirect effect through organizational identification and perceived insider status is also significant and negative. These findings suggest that FLCC influences OCB through complex identity-based processes rather than through a simple positive pathway. Because OCB was evaluated by supervisors, the negative indirect effects may reflect higher implicit expectations and stricter evaluative standards applied to insider employees in FLCC contexts. Overall, Study 3 extends research on the behavioral consequences of FLCC and offers new insight into how relationship-oriented cultural practices shape not only employee behavior, but also its interpretation and evaluation within organizations.

Overall, these three studies collectively advance a relatively comprehensive research framework for Family-Like Company Culture, moving from the identification of its practice framework, to scale development and validation, and ultimately to the examination of its behavioral influence mechanisms. This dissertation not only enriches the theoretical understanding of indigenous organizational culture in the Chinese context and provides an empirically validated measurement instrument, but also reveals the underlying psychological mechanisms through which Family-Like Company Culture shapes employee behavior. The findings offer an integrated framework for understanding the practical logic, structural dimensions, and behavioral consequences of Family-Like Company Culture, while also generating valuable implications for the development of indigenous management theory and for organizational culture building in Chinese firms as well as in other culturally similar contexts.

Date of Award	19 Jul 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Nottingham
Supervisor	Pingping Fu (Supervisor) & Fei Zhu (Supervisor)