The Paternalistic Leadership’s Mechanism Rasearch On Organizational Citizenship Behavior

As a social influence process, leadership behavior is rooted in the specific cultural background, its effectiveness depends largely on the interactivity between superiors and subordinates. Originated from Chinese culture background, and with a certain cultural heterogeneity, paternalistic leadership (PL) includes three dimensions, such as moral leadership, benevolence leadership and authoritarianism leadership. It has been proved that PL has an important impact on employees’attitudes and behavior. Organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) is not included in the official salary system but beneficial to improve the overall efficiency of the organization, including identification with the organization, altruistic behavior, conscientiousness, interpersonal harmony and protecting company resources. The antecedent variables of OCB attract much attention in academia, and the researches mainly focus on the individual characteristics, task features, organizational characteristics and leadership behavior. It has shown that, with the change in employee’attitudes and behavior, PL has an effect on employees’OCB, however, these studies are relatively fragmented, there is no systematically illustration about the influence mechanism of PL on OCB. Therefore, this paper attempts to explore the influence mechanism of PL and each dimension on OCB and each dimension in the context of Chinese mainland, and introduce affective commitment as the mediating variable, expect to make some significant revelations and suggestions for business management practice. Based on the theoretical analysis of previous studies, this paper proposes hypothesis and constructs a conceptual model. After the small-scale pretest to make sure that the questionnaire has good reliability and validity, we disseminate questionnaires to employees including junior and senior managers and gather data from them. In the empirical part, we firstly use descriptive statistical analysis of the sample data. Secondly, we verify the feasibility of the variables’dimensions by validity analysis and reliability test. Then we use One-way ANOVA to analyze the control variables. Thirdly, we use correlation analysis and regression analysis to explore the influence of PL on OCB and the intermediary effect of affective commitment.The results show that:PL has a significant positive effect on OCB, both moral leadership and benevolence leadership have significant positive effect on OCB and its dimensions, but authoritarianism leadership doesn’t have the significant effect. Affective commitment has a partial intermediary effect on the relationship between PL and OCB, and has intermediary effect on the relationship between moral leadership and OCB, so does the effect of benevolence leadership. At last, we put forward some management recommendations based on findings:the superiors should put emphasis on the influence of PL on employee’s attitudes and behavior, encourage employee’s OCB by moral leadership and benevolence leadership, focus on training and improving employee’s affective commitment, and take different leadership behavior according to individual differences in background.