Boundaryless career orientation and Internet professionals' grievance strategies: evidence from China
| Date | 31 October 2023 |
| Pages | 974-998 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-12-2022-0551 |
| Published date | 31 October 2023 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
| Author | Xiaojing Zheng |
Boundaryless career orientation
and Internet professionals’
grievance strategies: evidence
from China
Xiaojing Zheng
School of Public Administration, South China University of Technology,
Guangzhou, China
Abstract
Purpose –This article aims to examine the role of boundaryless career orientation in influencing Internet
professionals’strategies toward workplace problems in China’s Internet companies, which feature prominent
problems including excessive overwork. It addresses one question: how do Chinese Internet professionals make
grievance strategies?
Design/methodology/approach –This article draws on qualitative data based on semi-structured, in-depth
interviews with 134 employees from 6 representative Chinese Internet companies. The data were collected
during 2018-2021 and analyzed with a grounded theory approach.
Findings –This article highlights the role of boundaryless career orientation in explaining Chinese Internet
professionals’strategies toward workplace grievances. The author develops a comprehensive model to
illustrate how boundaryless career orientation influences four grievance strategies namely, strategic
compliance, exit, dissent expression and resistance that correspond to four different motives to advance the
professionals’boundaryless career: learning, transferring, relieving and resolving. Internet professionals
choose different grievance strategies based on how each option can benefit their boundaryless career goals.
Originality/value –This articleis one of the first to bring in boundaryless career orientation as a key factor in
explaining Chinese Internet professionals’grievance strategies. It provides a fuller picture than previous
studies by showing wide varieties of professionals’grievance behaviors. The finding of high- level
boundaryless career orientation among Internet professionals offers insights on how companies can
improve employment relations by improving career management practices.
Keywords Grievance strategies, Boundaryless career orientation, Strategic compliance,
Internet professionals, China
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Chinese Internet industry has skyrocketed over the past decade, with an annual market value
of 10,300 billion RMB (about 1,436.54 billion USD) and services to over 1.2 billion Internet
users in China in 2022 [1]. The fast growth of this platform-based business such as Alibaba
and Tencent was powered by the efforts of millions of Internet professionals who suffer from
overwork. Recent research has increasingly exposed the poor working conditions at Internet
companies including extreme working hours, work intensification, illegal dismissal, job
insecurity, burnout and many cases of death from overwork (Li, 2022;Xia, 2014). The “996.
ICU”[2] online campaign, which involved more than 200,000 participants from Internet
companies all over China, epitomized the escalation of ubiquitous workplace grievances
among Internet professionals.
ER
46,5
974
This paper forms a part of the special section “China’s Labour Relations in a New Era of 2020s and
Beyond”, guest edited by Drs. Kan Wang and Dong Yan.
The author thanks Kai Chang for his constructive comments on multiple drafts of this article. This
study is funded by the Social Science Foundation of Guangdong Province of China (No: GD21YSH01)
and the 70th China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No: 2021M701252).
Conflicts of interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 8 December 2022
Revised 31 May 2023
18 August 2023
4 October 2023
Accepted 4 October 2023
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 46 No. 5, 2024
pp. 974-998
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-12-2022-0551
Previous research has focused on various causes of aversive work conditions at China’s
Internet companies. These include China’s pursuit of technology dreams and lax attitudes
toward the problems pressuring tech professionals (Liu, 2023a), managerial techniques of
coercive and normative control that form the overwork culture (Li, 2022) and the use of digital
technology in intensifying work and competition among the professionals (Liu, 2023b). With
a few exceptional studies on the dramatic 996.ICU campaign (Li, 2022;Zhen, 2021), scant
attention has been afforded to how the Internet professionals respond to their workplace
problems. Since protest is not the only or major response among the few million Internet
professionals in China, knowledge of the wide range of their grievance strategies and their
rationales for remaining at their jobs despite complaints of toxic overwork is important for
improving employment quality in this expanding industry.
Extant literature on employee grievance have identified three major determinants of
employee grievance behaviors (Cappelli and Chauvin, 1991;Bacharach and Bamberger,
2004): labor power such as trade union, managerial factors like mode of control and labor
market conditions that influence alternative jobs for workers. However, employees in the
same company under similar mode of managerial control and similar condition of collective
labor power and labor market may still choose different strategies toward workplace
problems. The perspective of subjective interpretative analysis is important to understand
workplace grievance behaviors (Yang, 2020), and prior studies with this logic were largely
conducted among traditional industries. How employees in recent tech industries interpret
their work and act on workplace grievance has seldom been examined.
In this article, I argue that boundaryless career orientation is a decisive proximal factor
that influences Chinese Internet professionals’grievance strategies. Prior studies have
evidenced that boundaryless career is important for the tech professionals (Fallick et al., 2006;
Moore and Burke, 2002;Sun and Magasic, 2016). Though environment factors such as
management practices and labor market conditions may shape the feasibility and costs and
benefits of different paths to boundaryless career, this boundaryless career orientation is
critical in how they view their work conditions and choose different strategies.
This article draws on interviews with 134 Internet professionals that experienced various
workplace grievances at six large Internet companies in China. I find that the Internet
professionals exhibit high-level boundaryless career orientation due to strong pressures to
advance career within particular company and the attraction of high pay and career paths in
this vibrant industry. Four motives link boundaryless career orientation and professionals’
grievance strategies. The vast majority of them choose strategic compliance with intensive
work demands because they harbor a learning motive to accumulate on-the-job learning to
advance their boundaryless career. Some choose to quit their problematic job under a
transferring motive to fetch desirable career opportunities in other companies. Some choose
to express their dissent online anonymously with a relieving motive to release their negative
emotions from workplace problems in order to restore their psychological health for career
development. The least often used strategy is resistance: a few professionals with resolving
motive take confrontational actions to solve career related problems such as illegal dismissal.
Based on these findings, I develop a process model starting with environmental factors which
shape workplace grievances and boundaryless career orientation. Boundaryless career
orientation, representing Internet professionals’subjective interpretation towards the
working conditions, influences the four grievance strategies through four motives. In so
doing, this article contributes a fuller understanding of Chinese Internet professionals’
grievance strategies and their rationales.
The remainder of this article is as follows. First, the next section reviews mainstream
literature of grievance behaviors and shows how it can benefit from boundaryless career
studies. Second, this article describes the data and analysis process, which is followed by the
Internet
professionals’
grievance
strategies
975
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