"Let a thousand flowers bloom": Variation of leadership styles among Chinese CEOs

By Anne S. Tsui, Hui Wang, Katherine Xin, Lihua Zhang, P. Fu. 2004

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

C hina, a country with a 5,000-year history, is quickly becoming a global force to be reckoned with by all economies. The 20-plus years of economic reform has brought about a history-making momentum. In 2002, China surpassed the United States as the largest FDI recipient in the world. Its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) began yet another phase of development. Today, many economists see the possibility of China becoming the world’s largest economy by 2015, if not sooner. The prospect of China becoming the major economic power in the world fuels the urgency to understand how Chinese companies lead and compete in domestic and global markets. The tremendous changes in China make organizing and managing extremely dynamic, complex, and uncertain. New or old, big or small, all Chinese organizations have to adapt to new norms and regulations in order to compete in the domestic and international markets. The traditional state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are now competing headto-head with new entrants, i.e., foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) and domestic privately owned enterprises (POEs), each producing about a third of China’s gross national product. The rapidly changing environment also encourages companies and individuals to experiment, imitate, and innovate in order to be competitive. New managers and professionals—locally groomed, returned from overseas, or imported—work side-by-side with the old cadres and administrators who were deeply socialized by Communist ideologies and Confucian values. What results is a display of an unprecedented variety of leadership behaviors. This article aims to provide insights into the nature of executive leadership behaviors and styles in this emerging economic power.

Subfields: Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/21f2470c031aac6dc3a3df53b686572e65db9875

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Anne S. Tsui
2. Lynda Jiwen Song
3. Lifeng Zhong
4. Hui Wang
5. A. Y. Ou
6. Z. Chen
7. Katherine Xin
8. David A. Waldman

In Strategy and Management

1. Anne S. Tsui
2. Z. Chen
3. Katherine Xin
4. Hui Wang
5. A. Kinicki
6. A. Y. Ou
7. David A. Waldman
8. Donald S. Siegel

Citations in the corpus

• Humble Chief Executive Officers’ Connections to Top Management Team Integration and Middle Managers’ Responses (2014, background): “Conversely, Confucianism and Daoism, still strong in China (Pan, Rowney, and Peterson, 2012), teach leaders to be self-deprecating and lead without overtly appearing to lead (Tsui et al., 2004; Fu et al., 2010).”
• Unpacking the relationship between CEO leadership behavior and organizational culture (2006, background): “The Chinese CEO Leadership Measure came from Tsui et al. (2004).”
• Reactions to psychological contract breach: a dual perspective (2008, methodology): “We used Tsui et al. (2004) 4-item Chinese scale to measure this variable.”