Professional employees in China are dedicated to their work and want to be financially compensated for their efforts more than their emerging-market counterparts in Brazil and India, a new Thomson Reuters survey finds.

Across emerging markets, more than half of professionals hold making the world a better place as a personal priority, according to the survey.

"Our research findings demonstrate that today's professionals desire more than a paycheck - they are in search of a meaningful and purpose-driven professional life," Peter Warwick, Thomson Reuters' chief people officer, said in a news release Thursday.

The survey, titled "The Professional Revolution" and released by the media and information company at the Aspen, Colorado Ideas Festival, also finds that Chinese professionals rely on and trust social media to help them understand an issue or news item more than their counterparts in the US, a Thomson Reuters spokesperson told China Daily in an e-mail. Numbers pertaining to China were not available.

New York-based polling firm Penn Schoen Berland and Associates interviewed more than 1,000 professionals in Brazil, China, India, the United Kingdom and the US between Feb 28 and March 20 about their expectations in the workplace. The survey participants came from five industries: finance and risk; legal; tax and accounting; scientific research and development; and healthcare and health services.

The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent.

Across China, Brazil, India, the UK and the US, it found that emerging-market professionals are "more optimistic" than their developed-market counterparts that "hard work will be rewarded", Thomson Reuters said. Forty-two percent of emerging-market professionals and 17 percent of developed-market professionals "strongly believe hard work will always be rewarded", the company said.

The study also found that 57 percent of emerging-market professionals and 29 percent of developed-market professionals say that "improving the world" is "very important" to them.

Fifty-six percent of respondents "want to work for a company that makes a positive impact on the world, even if that means accepting slightly less monetary compensation", the survey found.

Fifty-two percent of emerging-market professionals and 36 percent of developed-marked professionals see "an equal number of male and female corporate executives as a trend in the next 25 years".

Eighty-two percent of emerging-market professionals and 41 percent of developed-market professionals agree that "blogs, information from social media or crowd-sourced information on the Internet are highly useful in helping to understand an issue or news item".

Eighty-three percent of emerging-market professionals and 49 percent of developed-market professionals agree that "carefully filtered information from blogs, social media or crowd-sourcing can be as accurate and useful as traditional media information".

michaelbarris@chinadailyusa.com