A Comparison Between Leadership Styles Of Chinese And American Managers In China: An Intercultural Perspective

In the past decades, many business researchers and practitioners immersed in questions of financial forecasting, market studies, and management models did not examine culture and the way it affected business. Actually, culture plays a vital role and becomes an indispensable part for people doing cross-national business.Unlike the hard data from measurable issues, culture is soft and slippery so you can't really grasp the essence of culture and understand what you've got. However, more and more organizations are finding themselves involved in communications across cultures, between cultures, and among cultures– because they are doing business in foreign countries. Therefore, the culture factor plays a more and more important role in our life. The main intention of this study is to analyze cultural influences on leadership styles of Chinese and American managers in China. The study focuses on three leadership styles in path-goal theory of Robert House as the basis and unfolds analysis on it. First, the author compares the leadership difference between Chinese and American managers within cultural dimensions and then prompts three hypotheses after that.To testify the hypotheses, the author uses questionnaires revised from the Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) by Bass (1985), Leadership Behavior Description Questionnaires, Form XII (Stogdill, 1963) and Participative Management Scale (Tjosvold, Andrews and Jones, 1985). Results from data analysis show that significant differences exist between Chinese and American managers'leadership styles. It is mostly agreed with the hypotheses. The thesis finally points out the limitations of the study and proposes some recommendations for future relevant studies.