Situation Of Chinese Enterprises Under The Charismatic Leadership Style, Organizational Impact Of Empirical Research

Charismatic leadership is a modern leadership theory originated in 1970s. Leaders with charisma can have significant influence on their followers: the subordinates fully trust the correctness of leaders' belief; accept, worship and obey the leaders unconditionally, recognize the leaders and imitate their behavior, and have strong perception on achieving organizational goals. Since the theory initiated, especially in the late 1990s, the academe and industry attach a great deal of attention to charismatic leadership style due to its significant influence and positive effect on the performance of individuals, groups and organizations.According to Conger's (1999) opinion, charismatic leadership originated in organizational situation for two reasons: firstly, organization in the complicated and transitional environment needs to effectively exercise transform to adapt to external environment; secondly, organization is increasingly challenged by members' loyalty and performance, the leader-follower relationship formed based on the emotional attachment between charismatic leaders and subordinates can influence subordinates' value, belief and attitude, and make them highly loyal to, trust and obey the leaders, in order to achieve unexpected performance. Therefore, Chinese corporations under transitional economy in particular need to foster and train a large number of charismatic leaders.However, compared to well-developed western charismatic leadership theory framework, such studies in China are still at the beginning stage. Due to the difference between oriental and western culture, charismatic leaders in the minds of Chinese employees might be distinct from those in western corporations. Consequently, the construct dimension and current situation of charismatic leadership in Chinese corporations need to be examined empirically. In addition, the existing study about charismatic leadership in the academe mainly focuses on studying its effect and influence mechanism on subordinates at the individual level, rather than examine it in a group atmosphere. As group efficiency has increasing importance on organizational operation due to objective oriented and harmony, leadership style will be a substantial factor affecting group's performance.Based on the above concerns, this study aims to examine the connotation and current situation of charismatic leadership in Chinese cultural background, analyze the positive influence of charismatic leadership on groups, testify its effectiveness on group variables such as group performance, group cohesion, group efficacy and group members' work attitude, and finally explore mechanism and influence factors of charismatic leadership.The study is organized into nine thematic sections. The first section is the introduction, which mainly illustrates background, purpose, theoretical contribution and practical value of the study, and simply summarizes the study process as well; the second section is the literature review, brushing up local and western theories about charismatic leadership, focusing on the construction dimension, effectiveness, mechanism and influence factors of charismatic leadership; the third section is the study design, which mainly involving the measurement method of variables being used in this study, questionnaire designing, collecting and analysis methods of major data; the fourth section is pre-analysis of the data, examining the reliability and validity of effective questionnaires, and employing correlation analysis and Multi-Collinearity examination, preliminary ascertaining the relations among variables and the quality of the data; the fifth to eighth section intend to examine the model, mainly focusing on construct dimension and current situation of charismatic leadership in Chinese corporations and the effectiveness, mechanism and influences of charismatic leadership at the group level, the ninth section includes the discussion of main result, limitations and future research directions.The fundamental conclusions of this study are as follows:Six dimensions attribute to Charismatic leadership in Chinese cultural background, including strategic vision and articulation, personal morality, sensitivity to environment, sensitivity to members' needs, personal risk taking and unconventional behavior. Personal morality is a unique dimension in Chinese corporation, which different from western culture, and fitting with Chinese implicit leadership theory. As major behavioral attribute of charismatic leadership, vision and articulation can effectively motivate members' enthusiasm. Sensitivity to environment, sensitivity to members' needs and personal risk taking are important behavioral attributes of charismatic leader in Chinese corporation to win members' support. The study result shows that compared to other dimensions, unconventional behavior dimension has been weakening, which might relates to the unique characteristic of prudence in oriental culture.Charismatic leadership has important influence on group effectiveness, and positive correlation with group cohesion, group efficacy, group members' work attitude, and group performance. This conclusion further demonstrates that charismatic leadership style can develop members' potential, provide them with guidelines and help them establish self-confidence, consequently, achieve unexpected high performance.Group efficacy functions as an entire mediator to the effectiveness of charismatic leadership. This result helps to disclose the "Black Box" of charismatic leadership's mechanism at the group level, and explains why group with charismatic leadership can foster high performance. Charismatic leaders usually illustrate bright future to their members by describing strategic vision, recognizing members' skills and abilities, and expressing strong confidence on members' commitment to high performance. All these can enhance members' confidence in accomplishing group task as a whole, and finally lead to high group performance.Group members' work attitude can moderate the effectiveness of charismatic leadership. Although members with high satisfaction will not always achieve high performance, positive attitude can help charismatic leadership style fully exert its effectiveness at the group level in order to achieve higher group performance. Due to author's limited vision, the study about the mechanism and influence factors of charismatic leadership needs to be further enriched and improved on the group level and organizational level.