Industrial and Organizational Psychologists on Group Motivation and Function in 1980s China

Victor Seow, Harvard University

In the spring of 1983, Edward C. Nevis, a Gestalt therapist with MIT’s Sloan School of Management, published an article in the Sloan Management Review on how managers might be able to improve upon America’s productivity and innovation by examining Chinese experiences. With the rapid rise of the Japanese economy and the concurrent slowdown of the American one, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a swell of scholarship on lessons Japan had for the United States and on comparative management more broadly. Nevis, who had spent several months in Shanghai two summers prior, saw an opportunity to weigh in on this issue of cross-cultural learning by bringing together his observations in China and his decades of work with American executives. In particular, he was taken by what he saw as shared concerns between Chinese and American managers about “low productivity and lack of innovation,” particularly around the question of whether the individual or the group should be the basis for initiatives aimed at improving motivation at work. In this talk, I examine how Chinese industrial and organizational psychologists grappled with the tension between groups and individuals in this first decade of “reform and opening up.” I focus on two areas of research concerning groups that industrial and organizational psychologists would try to address in their work. The first is motivation and the extent to which the structure of groups might motivate workers to strive for good performance. The second is function and if and how groups could be made more efficient and effective. Although the cases covered here come from the particular time and place that is 1980s China, the concerns they raise and the conclusions they reach regarding the relationship between groups and work extend to contexts closer to our own.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 138. The Metamorphosis of Socialist Valuation Regimes: The Epistemic and Institutional Foundation for Accumulation in Early Reform China