Participative leadership behavior among business leaders in China

Abstract

Over the past decade, the Chinese economy has grown to become the second largest in the world. In order to survive in rapidly changing global markets, Chinese management teams must adopt an appropriate leadership style to retain talented employees and attract competent applicants to the company. Therefore, in order to understand whether a participative leadership style has been adopted among Chinese companies, this study identified three kinds of corporations in China: (a) branch offices of foreign enterprises or joint-venture corporations (JVEs); (b) Chinese privately owned enterprises doing international business (POEIs); and (c) Chinese privately owned enterprises doing domestic business only (POELs). This study used the Empowering Leadership Questionnaire (Arnold, Arad, Rhoades, & Drasgow, 2000) to assess participants' perceptions of participative leadership behaviors among their supervisors. Of 460 in the sample pool of Chinese employees with at least one year of experience in their current companies who received the survey by email, there were 346 with valid data, and the final response rate was 76.3%. After utilizing factor analyses, frequency table, one-way ANOVA, and Tukey-HSD post hoc test, two significant differences existed in the (a) informing; and (b) participative decision-making and coaching behavior of participative leadership style between POELs and JVEs, and both indicated that POELs produced higher levels of perception than JVEs. Furthermore, three specific behaviors were identified to explain these differences: (a) explains company goals; (b) explains company decisions; and (c) listens to my work group's ideas and suggestions. This research provides HRD professionals with a reference to help supervisors develop participative leadership in China, recognizing the items on which supervisors generally scored the lowest within the Chinese context.