Research on Cross-Cultural Conflict and Employee’s Turnover Intention in Chinese Multinational Enterprises

This paper explores the relationship between cross-cultural conflict, job satisfaction and employee’s turnover intention from the perspective of human resource management. Information was collected by distributing 480 questionnaires to local employees from Chinese-funded enterprise operating in Philippines. A total of 403 valid questionnaires were received. The results of the study indicate that the four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict are negatively related to employee’s turnover intention. Job satisfaction is found to mediate the relationship between the four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict and employee’s willingness to leave. By examining the specific dimensions of cross-cultural conflict, this paper further clarifies that the impacts of different dimensions of conflict on employee turnover vary from culture to culture. This study enriches the literature on Human resource management. Managerial suggestions for Chinese-funded enterprises are also provided in this study.


Introduction
With the economic globalization and regional economic integration, more and more companies are exploring overseas market to effectively allocate resources (Chen & Li, 2019). In order to eliminate tariff and non-tariff barriers, China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed the Asia-China Free Trade Agreement (ACFTA) on November 4, 2002, which promoted economic organizations, including the direct cost of recruiting new employees, as well as the indirect cost of reduced productivity due to loss of experienced workers.
Reviewing the existing literature on cross-cultural conflict management, it can be seen that previous studies on cross-cultural conflict management are mainly from the perspective of cultural differences (Ting-Toomey, 1994;De Dreu & Beersma, 2005;Mayer, 2012;Chen et al., 2018). Although some researchers examined the impact of cross-cultural conflicts on employee's turnover intention (Davis & Nair, 2003;Yamanoi & Sayama, 2013), there are few studies on the influence of specific dimensions of conflict on employee's turnover intention in a multicultural context. It is a common view that frequent conflicts put employees under high work pressure, which makes employees generate turnover intention and eventually leave their jobs (Siswanto & Miranda, 2020). Therefore, it is important to investigate the impact of cross-cultural conflicts on employee's turnover intentions for Chinese-funded enterprises operating in Philippines.
The relationship between job satisfaction and employee's turnover intentions has been well demonstrated Tarigan & Arianil, 2015). In fact, cultural differences lead to unavoidable work conflicts within the organization. If these conflicts cannot be handled properly, the accumulation of dissatisfaction in the long run may result in employee's turnover intention (Parvaiz et al., 2015). As culture shapes values, obvious difference exists among employees of different cultural backgrounds on the satisfaction of their work (Chu, 2008;Rozkwitalska & Basinska, 2015). Lack of knowledge on how the different dimensions of cross cultural conflict influence on job satisfaction and turnover intention creates a gap between what we know about the ability of cross cultural conflict to influence job satisfaction and turnover intention and how they do it.
In addition, most Chinese-funded companies run overseas business over a relatively short period of time. There is a general lack of empirical data on the cross-cultural conflicts of Chinese-funded enterprises compared with western countries.
Studies have shown that the frustration and anger brought about by crosscultural conflicts can lead to communication interruptions and low morale, thereby reducing team performance and increasing employee turnover rate (Milliman et al., 2002). This paper employs the framework of Irshad (2012), which divides cross-cultural conflicts into four dimensions: salary & compensation, personal development, work-life balance, and fairness. On this basis, job satisfaction is introduced as a mediating variable to explore the influence of the cross-cultural conflict with Chinese-funded enterprises in Philippines on employee's turnover intention. (Figure 1) Salary & Compensation and Turnover Intention Salary and compensation are important factors that affect job satisfaction, improve employee motivation and manage employee retention (Chew, 2005). As China's traditional culture values employee loyalty and team performance, the salary system of Chinese enterprise not only focuses on employees' professional Z. An Open Journal of Business and Management abilities, but also attaches importance to the qualifications. At the same time, benefits are distributed collectively (Li & Su, 2016). Unlike China, Filipinos are not used to collectivism. The tendency of individualism of Philippines is higher, which is close to Spain and the United States. In addition, there are a large number of incomplete contracts with underemployment in Philippines. Since Filipino employees are not in support of a life-long job, job-hopping is common (Zheng et al., 2020). Learning from the successful experience of Western countries in their multinational operations, Chinese enterprises have adopted salary-compensation as the main policy to motivate employees performance and retention. However, some studies show that such measure may not always be effective in different cultures. Employees who strive to meet basic needs prefer cash rewards, while those with a more comfortable life tend to seek recognition and appreciation, as well as more interesting work and empowerment (Rai, 2004). Klein (1973) believed that incentives are suitable for local culture, because job satisfaction depends to a large extent on how local employees think they are treated. Based on the above discussion, the following hypothesis is proposed: H1: Salary & compensation is negatively related to employee's turnover intention.

Personal Development and Turnover Intention
The employees' motivation for personal development is mainly refers to promotion, salary raise, and career prospects. Some enterprises bring their domestic management systems abroad when expanding overseas markets. In order to successfully transfer the management system and maintain competitiveness, a number of foreign managers are sent to overseas subsidiaries (Gamble, 2008).
Such a practice has greatly discouraged the local employees and made them feel confused about the career path in the enterprise. Those employees who think that there is few chances for promotion in the enterprise may have the Intention to leave the organization, because the management positions have been occupied by foreign managers assigned by the parent company (Legewie, 2002). Researchers suggested that enterprise can use training as a tool for employee development in order to increase employee retention as well as corporate competitive advantage (Visser & Van Der Sluis, 2006;Fletcher, 2019). But there are conflicting views on the positive impact of training on employee retention. Some studies revealed that training may lead to an increase in turnover rate, especially in general skills training (Becker, 2009). In addition, the support of colleagues or supervisors is considered to have a certain impact on the personal development of employees from a psychological view (Cornes et al., 2011). However, due to the high power distance, it is often difficult for ordinary employees to feel the support of senior managers in Chinese enterprises (Ye et al., 2017). Based on the above discussion, the following hypothesis is proposed: H2: Personal development is negatively related to employee's turnover intention.
Work-Life Balance and Turnover Intention The problem of work-life balance has attracted considerable attention from many researchers (Greenhaus et al., 2012;McNamara et al., 2013;Wayne et al., 2017). Studies found that work-life balance and organizational management are inseparable, and the demanding needs for work-life balance differ from culture to culture. The differences in the work-life conflicts of people from different countries are very important for organizations to make full use of performance and productivity to motivate employees and influence their intention to quit (Deery, 2008;Haar et al., 2012). The study conducted by Noman et al. (2020) verified this point of view. Noman et al. (2020) found that Chinese employees are more devoted to their work, while Pakistani employees have different workvalue orientations that they give priority to family issues, such as family gatherings, accompanying children, etc. Moreover, Susi and Jawaharrani (2011) believed that organizations must pay attention to the work-life balance of employees in terms of culture, which could lead to higher organizational commitment. In addition, work-life balance must support and encourage all levels of employees, including senior managers, middle managers and general staffs. Based on the above discussion, the following hypothesis is proposed: H3: Work-life balance is negatively related to employee's turnover intention.
Fairness and Turnover Intention Organizational fairness is defined as the perception of fair in treatment of individuals or groups internal to that organization, including procedural fairness, distributive fairness, and interactional fairness (Sharma, Borna, & Stearns, 2009). As culture shapes fairness behavior (Blake et al., 2015), a sense of fairness in a society may not be accepted by another culture. Research on cross-cultural management has shown that cultural dimensions influence the perception of fairness (Greenberg, 2001;Brockner et al., 2005). There is evidence that procedural fairness has a greater impact on the turnover intention of employees from low-power distance than on the turnover intention of employees from countries with high-power distance (Kim & Leung, 2007). Toh and DeNisi (2003) believed that multinational enterprises should pay attention to the distributive fairness. If there exist large pay gaps between foreign employees and local employees in the enterprise, then the level of individual feeling of depression would increase, which may cause employee's turnover intention. Finally, as daily work routines give supervisors more discretion in social interactions with subordinates, interactional fairness are more immediate for subordinates than procedural fairness Z. An or distributive fairness (Kyei-Poku, 2019). Especially in international organizations, a bias in favor of foreign employees would only increase the willingness of local employees to leave. Based on the above discussion, the following hypothesis is proposed: H4: Fairness is negatively related to employee's turnover intention. Mediating Effect of Job Satisfaction Current literature on the variable of job satisfaction mostly focused on its impact on employee job performance and turnover intention (e.g. Shaju & Subhashini, 2017;Omar et al., 2020;Huang et al., 2017;Rahman, 2020). A significant negative correlation between job satisfaction and employee turnover intention was revealed. Specifically, when the overall assessment of employee satisfaction is low (such as salary, position, work hours, etc.), dissatisfaction with current job makes them to look for alternative opportunities (Calisir et al., 2011). A survey on Turkish nurses' turnover intention conducted by Masum et al. (2016) indicated that job satisfaction is the most important predictor of turnover intention.
Previous studies rarely examined the relationship between conflict, job satisfaction and turnover intention in a cross-cultural context. Some research work showed that cultural differences lead to inevitable conflicts in the process of management. If conflicts are not paid much attention and, the result could lead to an increase of work burdened and dissatisfaction, which proves a positive factor for the intention to quit (Wu, 2014;Kesari et al., 2014). Therefore, job satisfaction partially mediates the relationship between cross-cultural conflict and turnover intention. Based on the above discussion, the following hypothesis is proposed: H5a: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between salary & compensation and employee's turnover intention.
H5b: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between personal development and employee's turnover intention.
H5c: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between work-life balance and employee's turnover intention.
H5d: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between fairness and employee's turnover intention.

Method
This study adopts quantitative research methods to investigate the relationship between cross-cultural conflicts, employee's turnover intention and job satisfaction within Chinese-funded enterprises in Philippines. For data collection, the survey method is employed, because a large amount of information from a large sample can be obtained in an economical way (Singh & Dixit, 2011). The data collected through questionnaire is used to test the relationship between the proposed variables. Sampling The sampling frame of this study is Chinese-funded enterprises that in Philip-pines. The sample is developed from the list of Chinese Enterprises Philippine Association. The paper adopts snowball sampling. First, preliminary informants in the Chinese firms were approached to help recommend potential participants. The recommended employees were then contacted by email and approached to secure their cooperation in the study. They were then instructed to answer the questionnaires. Finally, a sample of Filipino employees from three Chinesefunded enterprises was selected. The sample size is calculated using the following formula (Ahmad & Halim, 2017): (1) n = Desired sample size; 1 α 2 z − = Critical value and a standard value for the corresponding level of confidence; p = Expected prevalence or based on previous research; q = 1 − p; d = Margin of error or precision. 5% margin of error and 95% confidence interval with 50% prevalence was considered for calculation (Chiedu et al., 2017;Othman et al., 2020).
A total 460 participants were recruited for this study. Data Collection A self-administered questionnaire was developed in English to collect data. The questionnaire contains demographic information and close-ended questions. All the scales used in the questionnaire were adapted from studies with valid and reliable measures of corresponding constructs. Table 1 below lists the statements that make up each construct. All the items were rated on 5-point Likert scales, ranging from "strongly disagree" (1) to "strongly agree" (5).
The survey was conducted in June 2021. Questionnaires were sent to 460 Filipino employees of Chinese-funded enterprises via email, including a brief description of the purpose and content of this study. A total of 405 questionnaires were received, of which 17 were unusable due to wrong and leaked filling of the items. This resulted in 388 valid questionnaires and a response rate of 84.35%.
Data Analysis Technique Frequency analysis was adopted to summarize the demographic characteristics of the sample. Descriptive statistics was used to explain the statistical significance of the variables. In terms of the correlation analysis, the correlations between cross-cultural conflict, turnover intention and job satisfaction were investigated through Pearson correlation coefficient. Finally, regression analysis was conducted to test the hypotheses proposed in this study.
Control Variable In order to control for factors that may affect the results of the study, gender, age, and job position are selected as control variables based on the existing studies (Samad, 2006;Liu et al., 2010).
Z. An Remuneration of this company is competitive compared to what is offered in Philippine companies.
All necessary benefits are provided in this company.
I am satisfied with the benefits and compensation that I received in this company.

Personal Development
This company provides fair opportunities for promotion. Delery & Doty (1996) This company gives me chances for advancement via training.
I have received skill development via training in this company.

Work-Life Balance
This company is committed to maintaining the work-life balance of employee. Huang et al. (2007) The workload of my job is reasonable.
This company gives me flexible working hours so that I can deal with family, religious and social relation issues.

Fairness
Employees are treated equally in this company.
Hassan (2013) Assignment is given on the basis of merit in this company.
My salary matches the contribution I made to this company.
Everyone in this company has equal promotion opportunities.

Reliability and Validity
To assess the reliability of the constructs, the internal consistency was used to access reliability. It considers as acceptable if the value of Cronbach's α > 0.5 (Malhotra, 2010). While for validity, the Average Variance Extracted (AVE) was adopted as an indicator, which should be equal to or less than 0.5 (Bagozzi & Yi, 1988).
On the whole, each scale has a significant level. All factors loading items are above 0.7, indicating that there is a good correspondence between factors and the infection threat. To test the reliability of the scale, Cronbach's coefficient α is applied. The values are all above 0.70, representing good consistency. According to the above results, it can be assumed that the proposed research model has good validity and reliability. (Table 3)

Descriptive Statistical Analysis of Variables
The results of descriptive statistics of key variables are presented in Table 4 below.
These data indicated that participants showed a high degree of agreement on the dimensions of salary-compensation and fairness, while they were relatively low on the dimension of work-life balance. The reason may be that there is lack of care and support for employees in daily work, which leads to negative emotions. In terms of personal development, the value is close to the average, which implies that more attention should be paid to individual's personal development.
In addition, the willingness to quit of participants is not high, indicating that most employees still want to remain in the company. Finally, the value of job satisfaction among participants is higher than average, but the standard deviation is relatively large, indicating that some employees have accumulated a certain Z. An Open Journal of Business and Management  degree of dissatisfaction with their work.

Correlation Analysis
Pearson correlation coefficient was adopted in this paper to measure the correlation between cross-cultural conflict, job satisfaction and employee's turnover intention.
The results suggest that significant negative correlations exist between the four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict (salary & compensation, personal development, work-life balance and fairness) and employee's turnover intention. Job satisfaction, as the mediating variable, is positively correlated with the four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict, while negatively correlated with turnover intention. (Table 5)

Regression Analysis
The regression analysis for mediating effect was adopted in this paper as suggested by Baron and Kenny (1986) to test the proposed hypotheses. The regression model was conducted in four steps. The results are shown in Tables 6-9 below.  Z. An Open Journal of Business and Management   In Model 1, the four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict are found to be significant and positive for job satisfaction.
Model 2 indicates the direct impact of cross-cultural conflict on turnover intention. The four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict are significant and negative for employee's turnover intention, among which salary & compensation, personal development, work-life balance, and fairness. Therefore, hypotheses 1 to 4 are supported.
Model 3 demonstrates a significant and negative impact of job satisfaction on employee's turnover intention.
In Model 4, when cross-cultural conflict and job satisfaction were entered simultaneously into the regression model as independent variables, job satisfaction still had a significant and negative influence on employee's turnover intention, that is, job satisfaction plays a mediating role in the relationship between cross-cultural conflict and employ's turnover intention. Hypotheses 5a~5d are supported.

Robustness Check
For robustness check, this paper conducted analysis with a sub-sample of 300 observations randomly picked up from the whole sample and reported the results in the tables below. The results are consistent with the results reported in Tables 10-13, suggesting that our findings are robust.

Conclusion
This paper adopts quantitative research approach to explore the relationship between cross-cultural conflict, employee's turnover intentions and job satisfaction. The following conclusions are drawn: 1) Cross-cultural conflict is significantly correlated with employee's turnover intention; 2) Job satisfaction plays a     Accepted H3: Work-life balance is negatively related to employees' turnover intention.
Accepted H4: Fairness is negatively related to employees' turnover intention. Accepted H5a: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between salary & compensation and employee's turnover intention.

Accepted
H5b: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between personal development and employee's turnover intention.

Accepted
H5c: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between work-life balance and employee's turnover intention.

Accepted
H5d: Job satisfaction mediates the relationship between fairness and employee's turnover intention.
Accepted mediating role in the relationship between cross-cultural conflict and employee's turnover intention. (Table 14)

Discussion
This paper draws the conclusion that all the four dimensions of cross-cultural conflict are negatively related to employee's turnover intentions. Existing studies showed that cross-cultural conflicts can make employees generate turnover intention, and cause negative behaviors, such as high absenteeism or low performance (Li, 2011). If organization does not seriously deal with this issue, employees are likely to put their thoughts into action. Moreover, it is evident from the results that each of the four dimensions is significant for turnover intention but the degree of significance vary from dimension to dimension, that is, each of them has a different impact on various outcome measures. Personal development and fairness were found to have highest impact on turnover intention, followed by salary & compensation and work-life balance. However, relevant literature highlighted that salary as greatest significant factors for turnover decision (Kim, 2005;Shahzad et al., 2008). This difference in finding may be due to the country and industry variances or due to other demographic differences. Therefore, Chinese-funded enterprises should create the most suitable conflict resolution strategy to reduce the possibility of employee turnover. Another finding of this paper is that job satisfaction plays a mediating role between cross-cultural conflict and employee's turnover intention. Job satisfaction is an important measure of employee's intention to quit. Dissatisfaction with current job brings bad behavior-employees gradually lose their motiva-tions to work and become more focused on finding an alternative. On the contrary, employees with higher job satisfaction may stay in the company longer (Laker, 2011) even if a new and better job is just around the corner. This is because the uncertainty of the new environment usually prevents people from leaving their current jobs. In addition, employees who are more dissatisfied with their work have a stronger tendency to leave if cross-cultural conflict occurs. Whereas higher job satisfaction makes employees become more tolerant of crosscultural conflicts at work (Mushtaq et al., 2014).
This study proposes the following suggestions to improve the cross-cultural conflict management of Chinese-funded enterprises: 1) Carry out suitable cross-cultural conflict management and training and reduce cross-cultural conflicts in the organization Chinese-funded enterprises should pay attention to cross-cultural conflicts and create a suitable conflict resolution strategy. At the same time, suitable training programs should be created for employees with different cultural backgrounds. In addition, foreign managers need to learn the local language and culture to avoid a new round of conflicts caused by misunderstandings.
2) Strengthen internal communication and build an effective feedback mechanism Managers should attach great importance to the construction and improvement of feedback mechanism, so that the problems encountered by employees of different cultural backgrounds can be solved in a corresponding manner. In addition, Chinese-funded enterprises should respect the right of local employees to express reasonable opinions and encourage them to participate in the company's daily affairs, so as to change the original operation pattern and improve work performance.
3) Increase job satisfaction and reduce turnover intention Empirical studies demonstrated the positive effect of job satisfaction on reducing employee turnover intention (Chu, 2008;Rozkwitalska & Basinska, 2015). Organizations can improve job satisfaction by meeting their reasonable needs, such as providing employee benefits (annual leave, bonuses, allowances), creating a promising career path, or maintaining fair behavior for all employees. As job satisfaction is not always related to salary or compensation in different cultural environments, maintaining all aspects of the working environment can continuously improve employee job satisfaction, and the turnover rate will gradually decrease.

Contribution
Existing studies mainly focused on the cross-cultural conflicts within multinational enterprises in developed countries, with little attention to developing countries. This paper collected empirical data from Chinese-funded enterprises in Philippines, thus filling the gap in the research field of cross-cultural conflict management. This study also enriches the literature on human resource man-agement. Previous studies often explored cross-cultural conflict from the perspective of cultural differences, but fewer discussed specific aspects of cross-cultural conflict. This study observes and explores the impact of cross-cultural conflict on employees' turnover intention from the perspective of corporate management culture, so as to combine organizational behaviors with employees' individual behaviors. In addition, this paper provides a theoretical framework including cross-cultural conflicts, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions. The results reveal the impact of job satisfaction on the relationship between cross-cultural conflict and turnover intention, which can help researchers better understand the role of job satisfaction in employee's turnover intention. Based on the findings, this study offers relevant information and suggestions to managers of Chinesefunded enterprises in Philippines to reduce the turnover rate and improve corporate competitiveness, so as to contribute to the practice of multinational operation of Chinese-funded enterprises.

Limitation
Due to objective conditions, there are some limitations in this study.
First, this study focused on Chinese-funded enterprises in Philippines, which has certain limitations in the scope of research. The results may differ when the findings are generalized to other countries. Second, survey was conducted using cross-sectional data in this paper. Since turnover intention is a dynamic process, the findings may not clearly reflect causality. Third, all the data in this paper come from self-administered questionnaire. Due to factors such as the situation, perceived preferences, etc., the answers filled in may not match the actual reality. Finally, errors in data processing may affect the empirical results.

Conflicts of Interest
The author declares no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this paper.