HRM Research in the Mainland China: Toward an Etic-emic Balance

Purpose – The purpose of this perspective article is to identify the developmental trajectory of human resource management (HRM) research in the Mainland China as well as the major research gaps to be filled in the future. In particular, the paper focuses on the current challenges as well as the emerging research trends by reviewing the literature in HRM research in the Mainland China.
Design/methodology/approach – The paper takes a geocentric perspective of HRM theory development to analyze the status quo as well as the emerging trends of the future HRM research in the Mainland China.
Findings – HRM research in the Mainland China exhibited an obvious tendency of adopting an etic approach at the early stage of research, but displaying an emerging trend toward an emic approach at a later stage. However, the current HRM research in the Mainland China, including both etic and the emic approaches, falls seriously short of meeting the high-quality standards of the international academic community.
Originality/value – Through analyzing the status quo of HRM research in the Mainland China, the paper identified an emerging trend toward an integration of both etic and emic approaches in which the two approaches constitute a yin-yang duality as a unity-in-opposites toward a geocentric HRM research framework with a holistic, dynamic and duality etic-emic balance.