Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.8, 2020

The Organizational Working Environment from a Governance Perspective: An Analytical Framework

(Abstract)

Zhang Yan and Li Hanlin

China’s high-quality development requires an innovative working environment to improve the quality of work. Working environment refers to the kind of working atmosphere and conditions that people perceive in their organization. Those perceptions have an important impact on work behavior in the organization. Improving the organizational working environment is actually a social process of organizational governance. To observe this environment from the perspective of governance, we should consider the “embeddedness” as the structural background and the “work unit” as the carrier of the system; combine an emphasis on the organization’s order with the individual’s positive subjective perceptions; and analyze the organization’s social solidarity, conflict and integration, and protection and inclusion, as well as organization members’ participation, role structure and interaction, and structure and function. The analytical framework thus formed can quite comprehensively indicate the organization’s governance level and thence reflect the state of its working environment, casting light in a disciplinary sense upon overall research and dialogue in the working environment field.