When Fair Rewards Matter More: Economic Crisis, Employee Position, and Organizational Commitment in Japanese Subsidiaries in China

Economic crises may alter not only employees' commitment levels but also the mechanisms through which commitment develops. This study examines whether the determinants of organizational commitment changed following economic crisis in Japanese subsidiaries operating in China and whether such changes differed by employee position. Using repeated employee survey data collected between 2007 and 2011, Study 1 compared temporal changes across four subsidiaries. Results showed that increasing reliance on reward fairness was concentrated within one manufacturing subsidiary rather than occurring uniformly across firms. Study 2 focused on production workers within this subsidiary and tested whether the association between reward fairness and commitment strengthened after crisis. Regression analyses indicated that reward fairness became significantly more important for organizational commitment following the crisis ( β = 0.184, p < 0.001). The increase was significantly weaker among supervisors than among employees ( β = −0.153, p = 0.050). Additional models simultaneously controlling for alternative commitment determinants showed that only reward fairness increased in predictive importance after the crisis, whereas other determinants remained stable or weakened. These findings suggest that economic disruption may reshape commitment formation processes and that employee position conditions responses to reward fairness under uncertainty. The study contributes to HRM research by demonstrating that commitment determinants are dynamic, context dependent, and heterogeneous across organizational settings.