Editorial: taking an indigenous approach to study organizational behavior in China

Since the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and open policy” started in 1978, China’s economy has been growing rapidly and today is the second largest economy in the world. In the globalization age, China s economy has become more integrated and increasingly interdependent with the rest of the world. In this historical transformative moment, practitioners and academics alike have shown growing interests in management and organizational behavioral (OB) issues in the Chinese context. For example, we have seen an increasing number of OB studies using Chinese samples published in international OB and management journals each year. Although these OB studies have undoubtedly shed light on the uniqueness and complexity of OB issues in China, most of these studies tend to rely heavily on Western OB theories and paradigms in testing their proposed hypotheses and make little reference to the contextual factors or indigenous theorization process (Jia, You, & Du, 2011). Thus, there is still very limited evidence to suggest that these OB theories developed in the Western contexts are fully aligned with traditional Chinese culture and history, and current economic, social, and cultural developmental stages.