(Scarborough, 1998; Yau, 1988; Whiteley et al., 2000). HRM practices
such as teamwork, sharing values and information, and group-oriented
incentive schemes are based on the foundation of collectivism.
3 The doctrine of harmony and the balance between Yinand Yang: the
effort to achieve harmonisation of the workplace and maintain a
dynamic reversion that perpetually counterbalances all propensities
towards one extreme or the other puts the organisation in a stable and
sustained position. The concept of Yinand Yangprovides a mindset for
coping with the environment in an adaptive and flexible way.
4 Bing Faand the philosophy of war strategy leads to strategic thinking
and strategic management: the ever-changing nature of internal and
external factors forces human beings to adopt strategic thinking in
order to survive not only in the short term, but also in the long term.
The outcome of combining different philosophies such as Bing Fapro-
vides the general guidance for strategic thinking which helps organi-
sations to form business strategies.
5 The virtues and quality of leadership emphasised by Confucianism were
adopted by current management thinking in the area of leadership:
managerial leadership requires the qualities of wisdom, trust, sincerity,
benevolence, courage, and strictness to carry out policies (Chu, 1995: 29).
If managers lack these qualities, they will experience a shortage of sup-
port from employees, and the consequence will be low productivity and
discontent.
From these key elements of HRM, we can see that traditional thinking has a
profound influence on the formation and practices of modern managerial
approaches. In the next section, our country cases show that these elements
can be identified in their strategic thinking as well as HRM practices. However,
modification is necessary for individual countries in order to make their HRM
approach more relevant to their social, political and economic environments.
Hence, different HRM strategies and practices do exist in these four countries,
and that reflects the modification process. In the next two sections, we com-
pare and contrast four cases: Japan and Taiwan representing more developed
economies under the capitalist market economic system, and China and
Vietnam representing less developed economies under the socialist market eco-
nomic system. All of them were influenced by ancient Chinese philosophies
and such cultural roots led to some similarity in HRM strategies and practices.
However, the four countries experienced different histories and have different
political and economic environments. Hence, these factors may have reshaped
their HRM strategies and practices. It is clear that differences did and still do
exist among them.
200 International Human Resource Management