Research On The Impact Of Leaders’ Power Distance Orientation On Their Authoritarian Leadership Behaviors And The Moderating Effects

The current research on authoritarian leadership was mainly focused on two aspects, one was about dimensions and characteristics, the other one was its influence on organization and employees. Few scholars studied what factors could affect authoritarian leadership, and how to affect. Aiming at filling this research gap,based on our country’s social environment(big situational factors) and leader’s work environment(little situational factors) according to contingency leadership theory, we chose power distance as antecedent variable, and chose senior executive’s authoritarian leadership and team power distance climate as moderating variables from the point of social cognition. Then a complete theoretical research model were built. In short, the paper explored the generation mechanism of authoritarian leadership from two directions and three perspectives.Our study collected data by way of a questionnaire survey. Respondents were80 executives and their 525 subordinates, they are from Shenzhen, Zhengzhou and Xining City. The questionnaire content included information of control variables and research variables. Control variables included leader age, time of being a head et al.Research variables included power distance, team power distance climate,executives’ authoritarian leadership and senior executives’ authoritarian leadership.This article used SPSS18.0, Amos17.0 and other software to do the validity analysis,reliability analysis and aggregation analysis, then we tested our three hypotheses in the way of hierarchical regression analyses.Through the empirical analysis, we came to the following conclusions:executives’ power distance is positively related to their authoritarian leadership behaviors; team power distance climate mediates the relationship between power distance and authoritarian leadership behaviors; senior executives’ authoritarian leadership behaviors mediates the relationship between power distance and authoritarian leadership behaviors. The main contribution was described as follows:complement the development of authoritarian leadership and power distance; divide the environment of situational leadership theory into big situational factors and little situational factors; provide guidance for the job content and relations among employees, executives and senior executives. In the end, we pointed out the limitations and future development directions.