Cooperative and Competitive Orientation among Chinese People: Scale Development and Validation
基于中国人辩证思维的特点，开发并验证了合作取向和竞争取向两个量表，通过实验和调查发现它们对认知和行为有不同影响，对理解中国组织中的员工行为有参考价值。
Chinese people are known to be strong in dialectical thinking – a cognitive tendency toward the acceptance of contradiction. Based on this finding, we conceptualized cooperative and competitive orientation as two distinct constructs that represent individual beliefs about and attitudes toward the nature of their relationship with others. We hypothesized that as stable individual differences, cooperative and competitive orientation would have differential effects on people's cognition and behaviour. Adopting a contextualization approach to Chinese management research, we developed a seven-item cooperative orientation scale and a six-item competitive orientation scale that demonstrated high reliabilities and validities. A laboratory experiment using the response latency method showed that people scoring higher on cooperative orientation responded significantly faster toward words of a cooperative nature, whereas people scoring higher on competitive orientation responded significantly faster toward words of a competitive nature. A field survey in multiple Chinese organizations further showed that cooperative and competitive orientation had differential effects on employee task performance and organizational citizenship behaviour beyond the effects of the personality differences. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed in the context of work groups in Chinese organizations and beyond.