Abstract

The Chinese organisational sphere is impacted upon by a number of relatively distinct contextual variables; prevalent amongst these variables, is the Chinese manifestation of social network ties, guanxi. Thus, in order to further advance our understanding of this influential Chinese phenomenon, the development of tailored measures of guanxi is required. Therefore, this paper develops and performs the validation of a new scale designed to measure a particular manifestation of guanxi. The new scale’s items were generated and validated over four studies, consisting of focus group discussions, free-listing, pile-sorting and scenario activities (n=126), followed by a pilot test (n = 227) and a test distribution of the scale (n=506).The studies generated items representing both the categorical and dynamic dimensions of guanxi, as well the dimension of influence. The studies cumulatively evidence the scale’s sound psychometric properties, and provide researchers with a previously unavailable scale, contributing towards enhancing the consistency of guanxi’s measurement across future studies, and providing a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of guanxi.

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