The factors that determine the performance of private enterprises has for a long time been the main concern of academic research, previous studies laid more emphasis on the external constraints. With the market conditions and governmental policy progress in recent years, research focus has turned to internal factors such as corporate governance, organizational structures and so on, among all these internal factors, a main factor that researchers most frequently refers to is leaders behaviors. Compared to SOE and other business format, private enterprises with less external constraints has more flexibilities and the leaders behaviors has more influence on its performance. Since 1980s, most studies on leaders behaviors abroad takes "transformational leadership" and "transactional leadership" as their research framework, while in china relevant studies try to put organizational behaviors on the Chinese culture background and put forward "Paternalistic leadership" theory, most of these studies take leaders behaviors as independent variables, psychological variables such as work satisfaction as dependent variables, and try to find out the relationship between them, but less evidence has been showed on the mechanism that how the independent variables, especially for Paternalistic Leadership, have impact on the dependent variables.Based on pervious studies, this paper develop an integrative model to exam the validity of transformational leadership in Chinese culture background and the effectiveness of paterlistic leadership on Chinese private enterprises, compare the impacts of transformational leadership and paterlistic leadership on forms performance, and try to find out the behaviors that more suitable for Chinese private firm leaders, meanwhile, take trust as mediating variable, this paper exam the mechanism that leaders behaviors have impact on member's work attitude and firm performance.The level of analysis in this study is measuring the middle and high class manager perceived highest leaders behaviors and its impacts on middle and high class manager's trust and work attitude, as well as firm's performance, from the aspect of middle and high class manager. The main progress compared to former research are as follow: firstly, this paper take trust to leadership as mediating variable to exam the mechanism and open the "black box" of leaders behaviors has impact on members work attitude and firms performance ; secondly, taking Chinese management culture into consideration, this paper compare the effectiveness of transformational leadership and paterlistic leadership in a integrative model.This paper put forward hypothesis on the basis of literature study, field study and theory analysis, these hypothesis are examined through employing the statistical tool SPSS13.0 and AMOS5.0, in which 308 valid research samples comes from Chinese private enterprises through a questionnaire inquiry are used. The main conclusions of our study are as follow:(1) The effect of transformational leadership and Paterlistic leadership on firm performanceTransformational leadership has positive effects, while Paterlistic leadership has no significant effects, on firm performance, further study indicates that transformational leadership has strong positive effect on dynamic performance, but Paterlistic leadership has no significant effects on both dynamic and static performance. Dimensional analysis shows that all the dimensions of transformational leadership have positive effects on firm performance, in which intellectual stimulation and charisma have significant positive effects on dynamic performance, charisma have significant positive effects on static performance, but intellectual stimulation has negative effect on static performance. As for Paterlistic leadership, benevolence dimension has significant positive effects on both dynamic and static performance, but authoritarianism has significant negative effects on dynamic performance.In the modified model concerning leaders behaviors and firm performance, both transformational and Paterlistic leadership have positive effects upon firm performance, further explore find that transformational leadership has positive effects on both static and dynamic performance while the effects on dynamic performance is higher, Paterlistic leadership has positive effects on static performance and has no significant effect on dynamic performance.(2)The effect of transformational leadership and Paterlistic leadership on trust to leadership and employee work attitudeTransformational leadership has positive impact on trust including affective trust and cognitive trust to leadership, further dimensional analysis shows that idealized influence or charisma and individual consideration has positive impact on both affective trust and cognitive trust, inspiration has positive but not significant impact on affective trust and cognitive trust, intellectual stimulation has negative but not significant effect on affective trust, has negative effect on cognitive trust, it shows that the acceptance to transform and innovation in Chinese risk avoidance culture need to draw much more consideration. Paterlistic leadership has no positive relation with trust to leadership, further dimensional analysis shows that benevolence and moral has positive impact on both affective trust and cognitive trust, but authoritarianism has negative impact on both affective trust and cognitive trust, the reason may lies on the traditional dimension authoritarianism does not work in a more flexible and free modern society.Transformational leadership has positive effects on employee's work satisfaction, organizational commitment and task communication, further analysis shows that there are significant differences among the effects of different dimensions, the effects of task oriented dimensions, inspiration and intellectual stimulation, are comparatively weak, while the effects of relation oriented dimensions, individual consideration and charisma are strong. Paterlistic leadership has no significant effects on employee's work satisfaction , organizational commitment and task communication, further research shows that both benevolence dimension and moral dimension has positive impact on employee's work satisfaction, organizational commitment and task communication, but the authoritarianism has significant negative effects on task communication, and negative but not significant effects on employee's work satisfaction, organizational commitment.In the modified model concerning leaders behaviors and trust to leadership, the impact of Paterlistic leadership on both affective trust and cognitive trust turned to be positively significant; in the modified model concerning leaders behaviors and employee's work attitude, both transformational and Paterlistic leadership have positive effects upon employee's job satisfaction, organizational commitment and task communication, comparatively, the regression weights between job satisfaction and Paterlistic leadership than that of transformational leadership, while the regression weights between organizational commitment, as well as task communication, are higher than that of Paterlistic leadership;(3) The effect of trust to leadership on employee's work attitude and employee's work attitude on firm performanceTrust to leadership has positive effects on employee's work satisfaction, organizational commitment and task communication, dimensional analysis shows that both affective trust and cognitive trust have positive effect on work satisfaction, cognitive trust has positive effect on organizational commitment and task communication, while affective trust has significant effect on task communication, further exploration indicates that task communication tend to be single side when affective trust is high, the reason might lies in "blind trust" under the condition of high affective trust.As for employee's work attitude has positive effect on firm's performance, work satisfaction, organizational commitment and task communication all have positive effects on firm performance, while job satisfaction has positive effects on static performance; Organizational commitment and task communication have positive effects on dynamic performance.(4)The interactive effect of Paterlistic leadership dimensionsThis paper take further step to explore the interactive effect of Paterlistic leadership dimensions using cluster and ANOVA analysis, our findings indicate that three dimensions do have interact effect, for example, when high benevolence leadership demonstrate high authoritarianism can also result in high organizational performance, on contrast, when low benevolence leadership demonstrate low authoritarianism, the organizational performance turn to be the worst, it means that under certain condition, the combination of benevolence and authoritarianism does work effectively in Chinese background.(5)The mediating role of trust to leadership between leaders behaviors and employee's work attitudeAnalysis to the integrative model which deal with cognitive and affective trust as latent variables, and Paterlistic leadership without authoritarianism shows that transformational leadership mainly take effect to employee work attitude through cognitive trust , transformational leadership combine self-actualization and organizational purpose through developing member's commitment and common vision, and therefore improve subordinates confidence to the leaders and the future of organization, establish trust to leadership and follow ship, so as to actualize leadership effectiveness, especially in a dynamic environment and organization faced with transformation and restructure, trust to leadership is the key to transformation process. The results of this study well support this logical relation. Meanwhile, Paterlistic leadership mainly take effect to employee work attitude through affective trust, Paterlistic leadership gains subordinates respect through benevolence and moral behaviors, and therefore improve subordinate affection to the leaders and work, so as to actualize leadership effectiveness, this well support that benevolence and moral behavior are still easily be accepted by members and therefore take advantage in maintain employees affection and improve job satisfaction. (6)The mediating role of employee's work attitude between leader's behaviors and firm performanceJob satisfaction partially play mediating role between transformational leadership and dynamic performance, task communication, partially play mediating role between transformational leadership and dynamic performance , task communication, job satisfaction completely play mediating role between Paterlistic leadership and static performance. In other words, transformational leadership takes effect on firm performance, especially dynamic performance, mainly through organizational commitment and task communication, while Paterlistic leadership take effect on static performance mainly through job satisfaction.(7)The effect of control variablesThis paper use ANOVA and regression method to examine the effect of control variables, the result shows that employees with different age, education and trust propensity has different level of affective trust and cognitive trust, analysis to internal control indicate that under different control level employee's are significantly different and take a reverse "U" shape, it means that too weak or too rigid internal control may do harm to the interact relation between leaders and subordinates, and therefore reduce the level of employee trust.All in all, in our study, all the hypothesis that concerning the relations between transformational leadership and other variable this paper put forward are testified, these conclusion also give the validity to transformational leadership in Chinese culture background. Meanwhile, most of the hypothesis that concerning the relations between Paterlistic leadership and other variable this paper put forward are not testified, it means that the effectiveness of Paterlistic leadership, as a three dimension concept, deserve further research and discussion.The conclusions and findings of our study not only testified the validity of transformational leadership in Chinese culture, but also explained the complex relation between Paterlistic leadership and private firms performance, further more, it explored the mechanism of transformational leadership and Paterlistic leadership and opened the black box between leader's behaviors and firm performance, the findings and theory progress are implacable to future study and has exact implication to management practice. |