HRD Ethics and Morality in Different Societal Contexts with Identical Culture Tradition: The Cases of China and Taiwan

Abstract: Recently, Association for Talent Development (ATD) announced its 2022 winners of the Excellence in Practice Award. ZTE from China was listed as one of the global winners. But ZTE was recently fined in $1 billion for violating the United States sanction regulations and for offering false statements to the United States regulators in 2018, and was further banned from doing business in the States by the Biden administration. This incidence showed that the HRD practice community is in a paradoxical dilemma: the ATD applied HRD ethical standards rooted in the mainstream HRD view to judge and endorse HRD practices submitted from a non-mainstream authoritarian context. Such inconsistency unveils important challenges faced by worldwide HRD professionals and raises the following research questions: Does HRD have universal ethical and morality standards across the globe? If so, what do they look like? If not, how do we maintain consistent HRD practices based on acceptable ethical and moral standards? This study answers these questions by comparing HRD practices in China and Taiwan. Through historical literature review and analysis, we show that the HRD functions in the two societies, while may appear to be rooted in the identical Confucian culture, follow ethical and morality standards toward diametrically opposite directions. We offer analysis to show why this puzzle can happen under the same Confucian tradition. We derive important propositions for theorizing research to clarify HRD ethical and morality standards in different open and closed HRD host institutional context. Limitations and future research directions are discussed subsequently.