Research methods

Subjects

We distributed 600 questionnaires to several companies and on-the-job graduate student classes in Beijing and recovered 461 valid questionnaires with an effective rate of 76.8%. Specifically, 25.3% of the subjects are from SOEs, 27% from private companies, 25.7% from foreign-funded companies and 22% from other types of companies; 36.9% of the companies have fewer than 100 employees, 35% with 100-499 employees, 10.8% with 500-999 employees, 7.8% with 1000-1999 employees, and 9.5% with 2000 or more employees; 69% are frontline workers, 17% managers, 14% middle-level and senior managers. In terms of the development stage, 8.3% companies are in the start-up stage, 45.4% in the growth stage, 30.8% in the manire stage and 14.8% in the re-innovation stage.

MEASURES

The paternalistic leadership questionnaire of Zheng Boxun et al. (2000) was adopted as the paternalistic leadership questionnaire. The organizational learning questionnaire contains 29 items. The human resource management practice questionnaire includes five aspects and uses the three subscales of Lopez et al. (2006): selective hiring, strategic training and employee participation in decision-making. The compensation management questionnaire uses three items from Lopez et al. (2006) and one from Wright et al. (2005). The performance management questionnaire uses one item from the Wright et al. (2005) questionnaire and compiled four items according to the performance evaluation standard, performance communication and performance management system in performance management. The Likert five-point scoring method was used in all three questionnaires. The subjects were asked to evaluate the consistency with the actual situation of their own units.

Statistical method

The statistical analysis was conducted using SPSS 10.0 and AMOS 4.0.

152 The generative mechanism of organizational learning

Research results

The results of exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis on the human resource management practice questionnaire

In order to test the human resource management practice questionnaire, we conducted an explorative factor analysis of the data from the 241 questionnaires. It was found that two items in compensation management had low degree of correlation and low factor loading and communality, so these two items were removed. Then, an explorative factor analysis of the remaining 17 items was carried out, and five factors were extracted. The result shows that the five factors can explain 67.59% of the total variance (as shown in Table 4.23). Except for selective hiring, whose consistency a coefficient is 0.68, the internal consistency coefficient a of each dimension is higher than the 0.70 benchmark of psychometrics.

To verify the structure of human resource management practice questionnaire, confirmatory factor analysis was conducted on the remaining 220 data records. The result showed that x-/df= 1.94, RMSEA= 0.066 (critical value is 0.08) and NFI, IFI, TLI and CFI were 0.98, 0.99, 0.98 and 0.99 respectively. These results are in line with the model fit standard, indicating that the five-factor model fits well (Bollen, 1989). Therefore, human resource management practice questionnaire has high validity.