Beyond distributive justice: The reasonableness norm in Chinese reward allocation

Abstract

Western theorists have generally construed reward allocation as mainly a rational action by the notion that allocation decision-making is based solely on people’s justice concern. We argued that reward allocation, as a social act taking place in a specific social-situational context, is influenced both by some social interactive factors such as the relationship and social interactions between the participants, and by the pervasive social norms governing people’s conduct in a particular society. This study aimed at examining the influence of two such factors, guanxi (equivalent to relationship) and renqing (equivalent to human affect), on Chinese allocation decision-making under a distributive situation. We hypothesized that Chinese allocators would base their decision not only on their judgment of the participants’ contributions but also on their guanxi with the participant. Specifically, we predicted that the emphasis on guanxi and renqing would be manifested in the Chinese allocator’s employment of the reasonableness norm dictating that both reason (li) and affect (qing) are considered in making allocation decisions. To test this hypothesis, we adopted the scenario approach and asked subjects to hypothetically allocate a reward to one of six guanxi partners. The 228 participants were divided into six groups; in each group they were instructed to do the allocation based on one of the five norms respectively: fairness (he li), renqing, equity (gong zheng), “ought to,” reasonableness (heqinghe li), and to indicate what they “would” allocate. The findings confirmed that the reasonableness norm was the one which subjects adopted in reward allocation. The results were discussed in the context of Chinese culture.