Leveraging Chinese Culture for Effective Organizational Leadership: The China Case

The past two decades have witnessed the People’s Republic of China (China) experiencing fundamental transformation in every aspect of its societal life, including the transition of economic system from being rigid and centrally planned to free market driven, the transition of domestic enterprises from being government controlled production units to independent economic entities, the transition of industrial structure from having primarily stateowned enterprises (SOEs) to representing mixed forms of ownership (e.g., town and village enterprises, privately owned firms, joint ventures and shared-holding enterprises), and the transition of culture from being Confucianism dominated to becoming more diverse with emerging capitalist values (Wang & Wang, 2006). Few countries in the world have experienced as many changes in institutional rules, social norms, and cultural values as China is. This unique blend of changes makes China a fascinating case for study. In addition, China’s rapid development and increasing presence on the global economic platform since 1978 has provided numerous opportunities for multinational corporations from all over the world. In spite of such reality, China remains one of the regions that have been studied the least by organization management scholars (Tsui, Schoonhoven, Meyer, Lau, & Milkovich, 2004). This is evidenced by the relatively short history (more than 20 years) of research on organization management in and on China and consequently, the paucity of available literature (Wang & Wang, 2006). The magnitude of economic, institutional, and cultural transformations in China gives rise to many questions, particularly, how to successfully lead and manage organizations under such rapidly changing, highly turbulent and complex conditions? While leadership and leadership development are not new phenomena in China, the challenges posed by the ever-changing domestic and global environments are unfamiliar to many organizational leaders in contemporary times. Existing management theories that are primarily derived from studies in the Western context, particularly the United States, Canada, and Western Europe (Tsui et al., 2004), provide limited information to help us understand pressing issues facing organizational leaders in the unique China context. Furthermore, among the extant publications on management on/in Greater China, while much research attention was paid to a wide range of issues such as Chinese cultural values, human resource management, firm strategy, organizational structure and change, market transitions and reform, managerial performance, multinational corporations in China (Tsui et al.), very few studies were dedicated to leadership related issues in mainland China. Additionally, the majority of these studies reported empirical findings from survey or archival data analysis; the number of theoretical and conceptual papers is very small. Furthermore, a review of the bulk of the leadership literature points to a couple of cultural limitations. One is that extant leadership theories mostly capture and describe Western industrialized culture. In fact, almost all of the prevailing theories and empirical evidence on leadership are rather distinctly American in nature, characterized by being individualistic rather than collectivist, stressing rationality rather than asceticism or religion, focusing on followers’ responsibilities rather than rights, assuming hedonism rather than commitment to duty or altruistic motivation, and assuming centrality of work and democratic value orientation, (Littrell, 2002). These emphases are not particularly Asian in nature, and certainly not typical of China. Therefore, a frequently noted limitation of these theories is that they do not address the issue as to whether they can be generalized to other cultures. However, the available literature on Chinese leadership is scarce. Another related problem is that, within the extant studies of leadership from a cultural lens, it appears that much of the analytical attention has been given to organizational culture (e.g., Bass, & Avolio, 1993; Schein, 1985, 1992; Sinclair, 1993). Through the literature search, I found relatively small amount of research articulating leadership and national culture particularly in the context of China. Given such, this article is a timely and needed effort.