A Study On The Structure Of Followership And Its Relationship With Performance

When Reasearchers focus their research target on leaders, they have paied less attention on followers who are leaded by leaders. As leadership research becoming mature, leadership research is hardly to find new important outcomes. Therefore, more and more researchers turn their research focus from leadership to followership, which gives birth to followership research.This study has summarized the current followership research in the western countries from the aspects of research perspective, concept and dimension of followership, the types of followers, and the measurement of followership. However, those results are all based on the situation of western cultures.For complementing the current followership theory, also for starting the followership research in the situation of Chinese culture, this study has researched the concept of followership in the situation of Chinese culture. It mainly includes three parts:First, the paper interviewed 32 followers in Chinese organizations by construct interviews, and defined the concept and content of followership in Chinese culture by the skills of content analysis and coding. This part also developed the primary measurement of followership in Chinese culture.Second, the paper collected 511 samples from Chinese followers, in order to explore and comfirm the measurement of followership. To prove good reliability and validity, this paper applied the techniques of Exploratory Factor Analysis, Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Structural Equation Modeling. The research result showed that followership in Chinese cultue can be explained into six dimensions: loyalty, executive ability, mutual communication, enterprise enthusiasm, mental endurance and team cooperation.Third, the paper also tested the relationship between followership and employee performace by the ways of correlation analysis and regression analysis. The result showed that Task Performance can be strongly estimated by executive ability, mutual communication and mental endurance; while Contextual Performance can be strongly estimated by enterprise enthusiasm, team cooperation, loyalty and mutual communication.