Paternalistic Leadership Impact On Team Performance

Current domestic research on management focuses on localization. Scholars argue that the studies on leadership behavior and organizational effectiveness in Chinese enterprises should consider China’s unique cultural background.Paternalistic leadership with Chinese culture characteristics widely exists in Chinese enterprises, which is the embodiment of the thousands years’ Chinese civilization of China in the leadership.Based on this background, this research chooses hospital as the target of investigation, and use paternalistic leadership as the study variable which matches with leader-member exchange relationship. The study shows the effect of the relationship between psychological safety and pressure in the internal department of hospital. This study is based on configuration approach, social exchange theory and differential pattern theory. We study hospital department team and use the ideology “paternalistic leadership→team psychological safety/ leader-member exchange differentiation→team Performance”. And at last, we put forward a conceptual model and related research hypotheses.Learning from previous studies, we divides the paternalistic leadership into two dimensions which are authoritarian leadership and benevolent leadership. After that, we conduct a questionnaire survey from 15 tertiary-level hospitals, which includes 2316 valid samples.After in-group consistency test, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, multicollinearity test, we use regression analysis to test mediating effect of team psychological safety and moderating effect of leader-member exchange differentiation.The results show that authoritarian leadership has significant negative effect on team psychological safety, benevolent leadership has significant positive influence on team psychological safety, and team psychological safety has significant positive effect on team objective performance. Team psychological safety has significant positive effect on team subjective performance, and authoritarian leadership and benevolence leadership has not significant impact on team performance. Therefore, we argue that team psychological safety has mediating effect on paternalistic leadership and team performance.High differentiation of leader-member exchange relationship has significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between authoritarian leadership and team psychological safety. And high differentiation of leader-member exchange relationship has significant negative moderating effect on the relationship between benevolent leadership and team psychological safety. Low differentiation of leader-member exchange relationship has not significant moderating effect on the relationship between authoritarian leadership and team psychological safety, but it has significant positive moderating effect on the relationship between benevolent leadership and team psychological safety.The above results show that team psychological safety has mediating effect on paternalistic leadership and team performance. As contextual variables, leader-member exchange relationship differentiation has significant moderating effect on the relationship between paternalistic leadership and team psychological safety.Overall, high differentiation of leader-member exchange relationship amplifies the negative impact of authoritarian leadership on team psychological safety, and low differentiation of leader-member exchange relationship will lower positive impact of benevolent leadership on team psychological safety. Low differentiation of leader-member exchange relationship increases the positive impact of benevolent leadership on psychological safety.Theoretical innovation in this study are as follows: this study is based on configuration approach to discuss the matching of leadership behavior and context. Configuration theory is that the organization is not independent of the presence of various elements, but there are strong links and interactions. Therefore, when we discuss some of the variables in organization, we may analyze them in the organization context and use them as an organic whole. In this study, we use the leader-member exchange relationship differentiation as a organization context.This study extends the leader-member exchange relationship differentiation. This allows us to more deeply understand the role of differential pattern relationships in Chinese localization scenarios. Preliminary results of sociological research in this area is very plentiful. However, the empirical research on the issue in the organization is very limited. This study is based on Chinese Hospital’s management scenario. We conduct a large number of empirical differential research on phenomenon from the perspective of leader-member exchange theory. The result shows the phenomenon, that is, the team members will obviously feel difference in closeness degree of the relationship from the leader.Results help us to understand the formation of a team psychological security sense from the perspective of the relationship within the team structure. Based on the findings, we further propose measures to improve the level of hospital management and illustrate the limitations of this study, the presence of prospects and future research.