Research Staff Leadership Behavior Preference Of Cross-cultural Differences

Cross-cultural study of leadership theory draws more attention as the globalization goes deeper and the "Going-out Strategy" of Chinese enterprises unfolds. In order to mitigate the cultural shock and enhance the performance of enterprises, multinational companies on the one hand need to select the appropriate expatriate managers to fit the local culture, and on the other hand, in order to enhance the interaction between leaders and employees, expatriates should also adjust their leader behaviors to fit the preferences of local labors. However, to facilitate expatriates selection and leader behavior adjustments, first thing we need to do is study employee preferences on leader behaviors across different cultures, as well as what kind of patterns they display. With this background and goals, based on the implicit leadership theory, this paper takes the interdisciplinary perspective from among cultural psychology, cultural anthropology, social cognition as well as organizational behavior, draws on the cultural consensus approach, and investigates the consensus and differences on employees’leader behavior preferences, as well as the predictor of individual cultural representativeness. This paper first developed a leader behavior scale using bottom-up approach, and identified six dimensions and forty-eight specific leader behaviors in contexts. Then with this scale, and participants recruited from both China and U.S, this paper conducted statistical analysis on their rating patterns. Results show that, Chinese and American employees have consensus on leader behavior preferences, and there is not so much of large qualitative gap in between as quantitative differences, which means for most of leader behavior dimensions, differences between Chinese and American employees are just a matter of which is more effective (or ineffective), instead of contrasting directions (effective vs. ineffective). The analysis of specific leader behavior also shows that, both Chinese and American employees prefer moderate leader behaviors rather than extreme behaviors, which exhibits an inclination of "Zhongyong". But compared to Chinese employees, American employees prefer high participative leadership, while think high delegation is more ineffective, which corroborates with the extant literature. In addition, results show that in China, those who endorse a higher fixed theory of the social world are more representative of their culture, while this effect is only partially supported in U.S data. In the final part, this paper summarized all the conclusions from the studies, shows the theoretical and practical implications, points out the limitations, and proposes the potential future research topics.