How Paternalistic Leadership Affects Professional Commitment And Work Initiative

Leader is the agent of an organization and the core factor of the organization, itdecides an organization’s success or not. As we know, the leadership behavior is one ofthe key factors of effective management for organizations. As a result, the sustainabledevelopment of leadership behavior of one enterprise organization is a persistentproblem for many enterprises. This sustainable development of leadership behavior isalso a significant way of enhancing strategic ability for an organization.There are many accepted effective leadership behavior theories in leadership fieldsuch as the paternalistic leadership. The paternalistic leadership is the native leadershiptheory arising from Chinese traditional culture circumstances and the prevalent theoryin Chinese organizations. Many scholars such as Boxun Zheng, who through the longterm studies has shown that paternalistic leadership can be divided into threedimensions like Benevolent leadership, Moral leadership, and Authoritarian leadership.Those three dimensions are able to continually stimulate subordinate reaction behaviorto the leadership, which can further affect the leader-member exchange. TraditionalChinese medicine is also affected by Chinese traditional culture and it always reflectsthe difference for the charity and superb leechcraft. Presently, in the increasinglypowerful and intense social background of doctor-patient relationship, the importance ofoccupation spirit and medical ethics in modern medicine is more prominent. Therefore,it requires that the doctors should constantly improve their professional commitmentand the work initiative to ease the conflicts of doctor-patient relationship and also makethem adaptation to new medical environment. Then, in the influence of paternalisticleadership, this requirement will be more intense.This study firstly reviews the theory of paternalistic leadership and leader-memberexchange, then uses the doctor’s professional commitment and initiative as outcomevariables to build a structural model to explain how the paternalistic leadership inhospital affects the doctors’ professional commitment and work initiative. This thesisadopts empirical research method to test this model in departments of nearly500doctors in Chinese hospital and we conduct a questionnaire survey and use SPSS and LISREL statistical analysis software to collect and analyze the data. Research resultsshow that:(1) the benevolent leadership can positively influence the leader-memberexchange;(2) moral leadership and the leader-member exchange have the activerelationship;(3) the authoritarian leadership has the negative influence on LMX and,(4)the leader-member exchange will further influence the physician’s professionalcommitment and work initiative positively.The main innovation of this study is that it lies in the specific hospital environmentto research the paternalistic leadership. As we know, many of the previous studies werein the profitable organizations and rarely involve with non-profit organizations likehospital, which requires a very high professional skills and ethics. So this study canexpand the research of paternalistic leadership not only in theory but also give somesuggestions in the real workplace management.