Research on the Mechanism of Confucian Culture in Relieving Work Stress

As the world’s largest manufacturing power, how to relieve the huge work stress faced by Chinese employees for a long time has been an important issue for Chinese enterprises and academia. In this paper, a single-case longitudinal study of NINGBO SUNRISE ELC TECHONOLOGY CO. LTD is carried out using the procedural grounded theory. It is found that enterprises can affect employees emotionally and cognitively through in-depth and continuous Confucian culture education and practice, including precept education, example education and environmental education. Precept education means that the enterprise arranges employees to study Confucian culture books, which mainly include classics such as The Analects of Confucius, Mencius, The Great Learning, and The Doctrine of the Mean. In addition, it also includes more accessible and widely influential folk books such as The Book of Filial Piety and Standards for Students. Example education means that leaders set an example and influence the behavior of employees through their own actions. Environmental education means that the enterprise implements a series of Confucian cultural practices that care for employees to form a positive and harmonious atmosphere, which ultimately affects the behavior of employees. In this way, employees’ behaviors towards work and colleagues can be improved, and finally a good effect of relieving employees’ work stress can be achieved. The theoretical contributions of this paper are as follows: Based on the unique perspective of cultural tradition, this paper puts forward the model of “Cultural Compatibility–Work Stress Relief” and analyzes the internal mechanism of Confucian culture to relieve the work stress of employees, in which the superficial reason is that Confucian culture is the main tradition of employees’ life and the deep one is that Confucian culture advocates the spirit of self-improvement and self-examination.