MethodsParticipantsTaiwan. We inten

Methods
Participants
Taiwan. We intended to recruit a heterogeneous sample of Taiwanese employees working for various types of organizations, and ranked at different levels within the organizations. Participants were drawn from trainees of courses offered by Municipal Human Resources Development Center in Kaohsiung, southern Taiwan. These participants worked in various sectors of the economy, including manufacturing, energy, communication, finance, and social services. Questionnaires were mailed to participants after securing their consent to take part. A total of 226 questionnaires were mailed and 212 returned (response rate = 94 percent).
The other samples of participants were recruited from three computer and software companies based in the Science and Technology Park in Hsin Chu, northern Taiwan. Participants were given a questionnaire to complete at their leisure, and returned them anonymously to a contact person within their companies. A total of 100 questionnaires were distributed and 71 returned (response rate = 71 percent). After discarding questionnaires with excessive missing data, the final sample consisted of 258 employees, and the overall response rate was 87 percent.
PRC. The data were collected in Shanghai, PRC. Again, a heterogeneous sample of employees was targeted. Participants worked in various sectors of the economy, including manufacturing, printing and packaging, trade and commerce, and social services. Each participant was given an anonymous questionnaire by a contact person in the organization and asked to return it in a sealed envelope. A total of 260 questionnaires were distributed and 190 returned (response rate = 73 percent). Participants worked in companies of various ownership, including state-owned (n = 75 among 94 sent out), private-Chinese-owned (n = 50 among 71 sent out), foreign-owned (n = 25 among 34 sent out) and joint-venture (n = 40 among 61 sent out) companies. Analysis revealed no significant differences on research variables among samples from various ownership types, hence the four subsamples were pooled in further analyses. After discarding one questionnaire with excessive missing data, the final sample consisted of 189 respondents from both public and private sectors.
Preliminary analyses were conducted to check potential influences of industries in the present study. First, within-sample analysis showed no significant differences on research variables among the five and four industries surveyed in the PRC and Taiwanese samples respectively. Second, pooled-sample analysis also revealed no significant differences on research variables among manufacturing, energy, printing and packaging, communication, trade and commerce, finance, and social services industries in the combined PRC and Taiwanese sample. Therefore, the somewhat different distribution of industries in the present study should not be a serious concern.
As all the questionnaires were anonymous to encourage participation and offset social desirability effects, there is no way to check potential differences between respondents and non-respondents. However, as the average response rate was as high as 73 percent for the PRC and 91 percent for the Taiwanese sample respectively, well above the reported average for survey studies in the organizational context (36 percent +/- 13 percent) (Baruch, 1999). Therefore, the volunteer bias in the present study should not be a serious concern.
Due to practical difficulties in obtaining random representative samples in both places, researchers made the best use of their personal contacts and interpersonal networks to achieve reasonable size and heterogeneity of the study samples. Hence, our results should be generalized to the vast populations of employees in the PRC and Taiwan with due caution. However, our heterogeneous composition of samples cutting across a wide range of industries and ownership types should help to offset some of the sampling limitations.

Instruments

Four scales from the occupational stress indicator-2 (OSI-2) (Cooper et aZ, 1988) were used in the present study. Reliability, validity and usability of the Chinese version OSI have been established previously with Taiwanese workers (Lu et al., 1995, 1997a, 1997b), managers (Lu et al., 1999b), and the PRC workers (Yu et al., 1998):
(1) Job satisfaction scale (12 items): two subscales measuring "satisfaction towards the job itself' and "satisfaction towards the organization". Higher scores indicate greater satisfaction.
(2) Mental health scale (12 items): three subscales measuring it contentment", "resilience" and "peace of mind". Higher scores indicate better mental health.
(3) Physical health scale (six items): two subscales measuring "calmness" and "energy". Higher scores indicate better physical health.
(4) Work stress scale (40 items): eight subscales measuring "workload", "relationships", "home/work balance", "managerial role", "personal responsibility", "hassles", "recognition", and "organization climate". Higher scores indicate higher perceived work stress.
To measure Chinese control beliefs, we devised a new "Chinese primary and secondary control beliefs scale". A distinctive part of cultural beliefs comes to us in the form of pithy oral expressions: proverbs, idioms, and adages. These "popular sayings" represent succinct formations of experience and cultural wisdom. Collectively therefore, they constitute a crystallization of cultural beliefs. The Chinese culture is particularly rich in such sayings. In accordance with our definitions of the constructs, we selected eight idioms to represent Chinese primary control (CPC, mastery over the environment) and Chinese secondary control (CSC, merging with the environment) beliefs. These popular sayings are often used in everyday speech and thus have contemporary significance.

To ascertain the content validity of the scale, a group of four Taiwanese judges (two social and two organizational psychologists) independently categorized these eight items as either depicting primary control or secondary control beliefs. Inter-judge agreement was 100 percent as uniformity of opinions was achieved. A similar sorting procedure was conducted with our Chinese colleagues in the PRC, and they concurred with the conclusion reached by the Taiwanese group. Sample items in the final version are: "Man can overcome the fate" (CPC subscale), and "Man should submit to the fate" (CSC subscale).