Effectiveness Of Paternalistic Leadership In Chinese Context

The continuous innovations of companies have contributed to the Chinese businessprosperity over the past30years. Given the dynamic and complex environment,companies must keep employees creative to sustain their competitive advantages andsurvive in the competition. Undoubtedly, business leaders play substantial roles instimulating and championing employee’s creativity. Working in Chinese context,researchers have developed an indigenous leadership model and defined it aspaternalistic leadership which is a style that combines strong disciplines and authoritywith fatherly benevolence and moral integrity which is rooted in Chinese culture.Compared to western leadership, it has a significant and unique effect on subordinateresponses in Chinese context. Given the popularity of communist ideologies andwestern philosophies, Chinese traditional culture is facing more challenges than everbefore. And empirical studies reported ambiguous results on paternalistic leadership’seffectiveness in Chinese organizations. In fact, paternalistic leadership research hasdrawn many attentions from Chinese scholars: how dose authoritarianism, benevolence,and morality influence subordinates’ job attitude and performance today? Besides of theculture challenge, the potential conflict between Chinese practice and Western theorymakes the situation worse. There are many cases that paternalistic managers leadsuccess in creativity and innovation in China, however, organizational creativity theorydeveloped in western contries is trying to deny the effectiveness of paternalisticleadership in stimulating subordinates’ creative performance. How dose paternalisticleadership influence creative performance? And what does the mechanism look like?Facing the chaotic empirical findings in Chinese organizations and opposite theoreticalpropositions drawn from organizational creativity theory, we can’t stand questioning theeffectiveness of paternalistic leadership in China.This study takes two steps to investigate the effectiveness of paternalisticleadership in Chinese organizations.1) A meta-analysis exploring effect of paternalisticleadership on subordinates’ responses. Based on paternalistic leadership theory andleader-member exchange theory, we integrated previous empirical researches andanalized the effectiveness of paternalistic leadership. Using both meta-analytic method and path analysis model, we estimated the influence of paternalistic leadership onsubordiantes’ job attitude and performance. Meta-analytic results revealed that bothbenevolence and morality are positively related to subordinates’ job attitudes (jobsatisfaction and affective commitment) and performance (task performance andorganizational citizenship behavior). But authoritarianism impairs employees’ jobsatisfaction, undermines their task performance and organizational citizenship behavior,and has no significant effect on affective commitment. Moreover, leader-memberexchange significantly mediates paternalistic leadership’s influence on job satisfaction,task performance and organizational citizenship behavior.2) An empirical studyexploring the influence of paternalistic leadership on subordinates’ creativeperformance. We managed to incorporate paternalistic leadership theory withorganizational creativity theory to clarify the invisible mechanisms. Based on191supervisor-subordinate dyads in a state-owned R&D institude, we found that leader’sbenevolence is positively related to subordinates’ creativie performance, creativeprocess engagement mediates this influence, and leader encouragement of creativitysignificantly moderates the influence of benevolence. Besides that, we also found theevidence that authoritarianism can improve subordiantes’ creative performance whenleader is showing strong benevolence or encouragement of creativity. This study takes aholistic view to investigate the effectiveness of paternalistic leadership in Chinesecontext, and makes both theoretical and practical contributions.