Social Identity Enhancement Strategy and Employees’ Job Attitudes: A Case of Chinese Immigrant Employees in Korea
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Wei Li Wei Li , Kim Jee-young , Chung Myung-Ho 
Published: June 2018

As the Korean economy globalizes, more foreign employees are working in Korean companies. Therefore, it is important for foreign workers to be satisfied with their works and be committed to their organizations. Especially, the number of Chinese immigrant employees has been increasing steadily in recent years. In general, Chinese employees in Korean companies have lower status and more negative social identities (hereafter, SI) compared to their Korean coworkers because of relational demographic dissimilarities. Relational demography is congruent with the psychological group, so attitudes of individuals tend to be affected by the way in which they perceive themselves to be similar or different compared to others based on demographic differences (Tsui et al., 1992). Although many Chinese workers are highly educated, they are likely to be discriminated in Korean companies and this disadvantaged in-group status may result in a negative SI. To overcome these obstacles, Chinese employees tend to recover their threatened SI by obtaining a positive SI of which many Korean employees have or by improving their current status. Therefore they try to enhance their current identities in different ways in order to keep their SI positive.
This paper examines the effects of different SI strategies for lower-status employees (i.e., Chinese employees in Korea) and we propose that changes in their SI will influence their job-related attitudes. In our research, models based on the SI theory have been applied to advance our understanding of the effects related to demographic dissimilarity and job attitude. Drawing upon a theory of SI enhancement strategy, we classify three different SI strategies; social mobility, social competition, social creativity. Social mobility is defined as “a SI enhancement strategy that reflects an individual’s efforts to disassociate from a low status group and gain membership in a relevant high-status comparison group” (Chattopadhyay et al, 2004, p.184). Another type of strategy for enhancing SI is the social creativity that involves “comparing oneself to others on some new dimension.” (Tajfel and Turner, 1986, p.20). Lastly, Social competition is that minorities compete directly with majorities with a belief that minorities’ moral is imperative to maintaining justice and fair treatment of members in a culturally diverse workforce (Ely and Thomas, 2001). We investigate the results of SI strategies as well as the mediating effects of enhanced SI between SI strategies and job attitudes such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment. We examine our hypotheses based on the analysis of our data from 102 Chinese employees in Korea. We tested the mediating effect of SI on the relationship between SI management strategies and job attitudes using the mediated regression approach by Baron and Kenny (1986). According to the results, first, we found that different SI strategies have different effects on SI. Social mobility and social creativity strategies are positively related to SI, but social competition strategy has a negative effect on SI. Second, a positive SI increases both job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Third, we discovered that an enhanced SI has mediating effects on the relationship between SI strategies and job satisfaction. However, no mediating effect was found with regards to organizational commitment. This means, even though a Chinese employee who has a positive SI may be highly satisfied with one’s job, his commitment to the organization is not affected by his SI.
With these results, we discuss theoretical contribution of this study to SI theories and job attitude theories. Some practical implications with regards to effectively managing and motivating Chinese employees are also discussed in this study.