24

Chinese Culture and Leadership

Ping Ping Fu
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Rongxian Wu
Suzhou University, Suzhou, China

Yongkang Yang Jun Ye
Fudan University, Shanghai, China

Preface

As authors of the chapter on the Chinese GLOBE findings, we would like to make it clear that ours is, by no means, a comprehensive reflection of what the topic might suggest. Try as we possibly can, there is just no way we could do any justice to the topic within the space given and with the knowledge we have as individuals. Although the general information applies to the rest of the country, the quantitative information gathered for the analyses was from Shanghai only. The data for the project were collected in Shanghai, where the focus group interviews were conducted. For that reason, we would like to warn our readers against any incorrect impression that the Chinese are homogeneous among themselves, bearing only the characteristics described in the chapter. What is presented should be used as a useful reference for getting to know the culture and leadership in China, rather than an overview of the topic in the country.

1.  INTRODUCTION

The opening of the People's Republic of China (PRC) to the rest of the world has changed the world's economic landscape (Tsui & Lau, 2002). The steady economic growth in the past few years, together with WTO (World Trade Organization) membership, has aroused an increasing interest in Chinese organizations in the business world. Chinese culture and leadership has also become an interesting topic, even to the general public. In this chapter, we use the Chinese GLOBE data as our empirical support and briefly introduce the societal culture in China and its leadership. The first part discusses societal culture, starting with a brief introduction about Confucianism, which forms the roots of the Chinese societal culture, followed by a brief introduction of the Chinese history, culture, contemporary economics, and politics. We refer to it as a brief introduction because China is such a large country with such a long history, that anything written within such a limited space can only be viewed as such. Following this, we present the results from the GLOBE project about Chinese societal culture and organizational culture. We end the first part with a summary and integration of the findings.

The second part focuses on leadership in China. We start with a brief introduction about leadership in China, and use the stories of three historical leaders to show the persistent influence of Confucianism. The results of three focus group interviews are then presented to show that many of the desired attributes and behaviors of the contemporary leaders are still similar to those that have been historically respected. The connection clearly shows the influence of Confucianism, but at the same time, there is an obvious influence from Communist ideologies and Western management philosophies. Finally, we present the results from the GLOBE leadership survey to demonstrate the empirical evidence about the desirable leadership attributes and behaviors in China. The chapter ends with a summary of the findings in leadership and discussion of the implications of the findings.

2.  CONFUCIANISM: ROOTS OF CHINESE CULTURE

Of all the ideologies that influenced the thinking and life of traditional and agricultural China, Confucianism should account for the most. Over a century ago, an American missionary in China observed: “Confucianism is the base, and all Chinese are Confucianists, as all English are Saxons” (Smith, 1894, p. 295). In fact, since the Song Dynasty (960–1126), Confucianism has exerted such an enormous influence on Chinese history that the word Confucianism is almost synonymous with the words “Chinese traditional culture” (Li, 1986). Therefore, in order to understand Chinese culture, one must first understand Confucianism.

Confucianism was founded by Kong Fuzi (551–479 BC), who was later called Confucius by the Jesuit missionaries (all the Chinese names in this chapter are written according to the pronunciation of the standard Chinese). Confucius died almost a decade before the birth of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates (469–399 BC). However, the basis of the Confucian ideology were laid by the ceremonies and rituals established by Zhou Gong, brother of Emperor Wu of the Shang Kingdom. Zhou Gong, and others, enforced order and status among people at the start of the Zhou Dynasty, almost 300 years before Kong Fuzi was born. Confucius led his disciples to disseminate the rituals and ceremonies from the Zhou Dynasty and organized them in books. But it was in the Han Dynasty, more than 300 years after his death, when Confucian philosophy was officially accepted.

In 134 AD, Dong Zhongsu, a famous Confucian scholar, proposed the banning of all schools of thought except the Confucian school. Emperor Shun accepted Dong's proposal and government officers were then selected from among Confucius's disciples. Ever since then, Chinese culture has almost exclusively been identified with Confucianism. Even though Buddhism and Taoism were other two major schools of thought, and filled the needs of popular imagination and a popular religion, it is Confucianism that has continuously influenced the Chinese people and formed the Chinese culture (Li, 1986).

Although the “five constant virtues: benevolence (ren), righteousness (yi), propriety (li), wisdom (zhi), and fidelity (xin)” in Confucianism are the guidelines for behaviors, ideologically there are four major virtues in Confucianism: class system, obedience, doctrine of the mean, and renqing.

The class system refers to maintaining the ancient rituals and proper ordering of positions in society. According to Confucius, a person's social status, no matter how high or low, was given at birth and in the order specified by the five cardinal relationships (“wu lun”; Yang, 1993; cited in Farh & Cheng, 1999, p. 99). “By affirming and embracing patriarchy as the organizing principle of society, China's imperial rulers solidified their absolute authority over their subjects as well” (Farh & Cheng, 2000, p. 103).

The four virtues are closely connected to each other. The observance of orders would not have been possible without obedience, the next major virtue, which is also embedded in the order of the hierarchical relationship. Of the five cardinal relationships, three of them (father–son, husband–wife, and brother–brother) explicitly address social relations within the family (Tom, 1989). Because wisdom gained in a long life experience comes with old age, obedience is essentially the doctrine of filial piety in the family. Therefore, the eldest male possessed absolute authority, and all others were expected to be absolutely obedient and loyal to the family head. In ancient China, a country was perceived as a large family with the emperor as the head, so all countrymen were the children, and were expected to obey the emperor as their own parent (Yu, Cheng, & Chen, 1999). Therefore, we can say that the virtue of obedience is the cultural root of paternalistic leadership found in many overseas Chinese enterprises (Farh & Cheng, 2000).

Despite the orders and the expectations of obedience, however, there are always conflicts. When conflicts occur, doctrine of the mean (avoiding extremes, also translated as moderation) is the principle to handle them. Confucius believed that any extreme ideas would lead people astray and create disorder in society, and therefore urged people to control their emotions and refrain from desires in order not to lose insightfulness and the ability to remain obedient to one's superiors under all circumstances.

The last virtue, renqing, refers to being kind, benevolent, righteous, or respecting the feelings of other people. According to Confucianism, renqing is an internalized moral virtue that is more powerful than laws, because laws can force people to obey temporarily, but only moral virtues can teach people to have a sense of shame, which will then prevent them from doing bad things at any time, and urge them to be kind and righteous.

Chinese historian Li Zehou pointed out (1986) that Confucianism's domination of Chinese traditional culture is by no means accidental. Compared to numerous other schools of thought, Confucianism is more deeply related to ancient Chinese economic traditions and family legal practices. Active enforcement of Confucius ideologies can be seen in the socialization, education, and daily living practices.

3.  CHINA: HISTORY, ECONOMY, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

China is situated in the eastern part of Asia, on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean. It has a total land area of 9.6 million square kilometers, next only to Canada. From north to south, it measures some 5,500 kilometers, stretching from the central line of the Heilong River, north of the town of Mohe, to the Zengmu Reef at the southernmost tip of the Nansha Islands. From west to east, the territory of China extends about 5,200 kilometers from the Pamirs to the confluence of the Heilong and Wusuli rivers.

China's land border is 22,800 kilometers long. The nation is bordered by Korea in the east; Mongolia in the north; Russia in the northeast; Kazakhstan, Kirghizia and Tadzhikistan in the northwest; Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan in the west and southwest; and Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam in the south. Across the seas to the east and southeast are the Republic of Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

The Chinese mainland is flanked by the Bohai, the Huanghai (Yellow Sea), and the East China and South China seas in the east and south. The territorial waters of the People's Republic of China extend 12 nautical miles out from the base line drawn where China's land territories and interior waters border the sea. More than 5,000 islands are scattered over China's vast territorial seas.

The coast of the mainland, 18,000 kilometers long, is dotted with excellent harbors and ports, the most famous of them, from north to south, being Dalian, Qinhuangdao, Tianjin, Yantai, Qingdao, Lianyungang, Nantong, Shanghai, Ningbo, Wenzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Zhanjiang, and Beihai. Among them Shanghai is the largest city in China with a population of 13.56 million and well-developed industry, commerce, finance, and ocean transportation (information from the materials prepared by the Chinese Embassy to the United States).

History

With records showing the establishment of the Xia Dynasty in the 21st century BC, China has a written history of over 4,000 years. The history of China is usually divided into four major epochs: ancient times (from antiquity to 1840 AD), modern period (1840–1919), new democratic revolution (1919–1949), and the People's Republic of China(1949– ).

Ancient China was fairly well developed in both economy and culture. During the apex of the Chinese feudal society, the Han and Tang dynasties (agriculture, handicrafts, weaving, and shipbuilding) were advanced. Transportation by both land and water was made possible; extensive economic and cultural relations were established with Japan, Korea, India, Persia, and Arabia. Ancient China was also home of the four major creations, papermaking, printing, gunpowder, and the compass, which exerted an enormously profound influence on the history of mankind. Influential thinkers such as Confucius, Lao Zi, and Sun Zi (the author of The Art of War) all lived in ancient China.

The Opium War (1840) was a turning point in Chinese history. The Treaty of Nanking with Britain signed by the corrupt Qing court in 1842 resulted in bartering away China's national sovereignty, and marked the reduction of China to a semicolonial, semifeudal country. The situation remained till the Revolution of 1911, when Dr. Sun Yat-sen led the bourgeois democratic revolution, which ended the rule of the Qing Dynasty, and founded the provisional government of the Republic of China, thus putting an end to the monarchy that had existed for 2,000 years.

The May Movement against imperialism and feudalism took place in 1919. Two years later, with the help of the former Soviet Union, the Chinese Communist Party held its first National Congress and founded the Communist Party of China. After almost three decades of hard struggle, including civil wars against the Kuomintang headed by Chiang Kai-shek, and the war of resistance against Japan following the first Party Congress, the Chinese Communist Party, led by the late Mao Zedong, proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949.

For the next three decades, following the economic recovery in the first three years (1950–1952), China underwent several major political movements, including the socialist transformation (1953–1956), large-scale socialist construction (1957–1966), and finally the Cultural Revolution, which lasted for 10 years from 1966 to 1976. The Cultural Revolution brought great calamity to the country and the people, causing the most serious setbacks and most damaging losses since the founding of the People's Republic of China.

Economy

The Cultural Revolution left the Chinese economy on the verge of collapse. Fortunately, the Party held its historical Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Congress in 1978 and decided to open up the country to the outside world and started the economic reform. Ever since then, the country has not engaged in any large-scope political movements but instead has focused on building a socialist modernization with Chinese characteristics. Prior to the reform, the Chinese economic system had the following four main characteristics:

1. State ownership: Because state ownership was required by state socialism, all major industrial enterprises were owned by the state. There were many privately owned small businesses when the new China was first established, but they were all eliminated during the 3-year “Socialist Transformation” movement launched in 1956. In the two decades that followed, private ownership was virtually non-existent. Family-owned businesses were also collectivised and transformed into collectively owned types of businesses in order to sustain their existence. By 1984, about 70% of the industries were state owned, and 30% collectively owned. Therefore, until the reform, state enterprises were the backbone of China's business industry.
2. Central planning: Together with socialism, the Chinese government also copied the highly centralized planned economic system that the former Soviet Union established in the early stage of its industrialization. Under the central planning system, there is an institutional framework with the State Council at the top and several state commissions underneath it. The two most important economic administrative commissions were the State Planning Commission (SPC), established in 1952 and responsible for long-term plans, and the State Economic Commission (SEC), established in 1956 and in charge of annual operational plans. Established in the same year was the General Bureau for the Supply of Raw Materials, which allocated resources and materials, and the State Technology Commission, which was created to plan long-term technical development.
3. Local government involvement: It would have been impossible for China to implement the central planning system without the agencies at various levels. The structure of the local government and their functions usually corresponded to that of the central government and embraced the local planning and economic commissions and industrial and functional bureaus. Organizations were also categorized into provincial, municipal, or county level, and were controlled by the government agencies correspondingly.
4. Dominance of the Chinese Communist Party: The relationship between the Central Government and central Chinese Communist Party Committee is displayed in Figure 24.1. As can be seen, the Communist Party committee exists at every level and was, and still is in many organizations, part of the decision-making body. Party committees or general branches (depending on the size of the enterprise), headed by the Party secretary, issued directives and commands, supervised individual Party members and other non-Party staff, determined personnel issues (within the organization), and organized political educational programmes.

Figure 24.1. Industrial governance in the Chinese urban industrial sector. From Lu (1996). Copyright 1996 by Macmillan. Adapted by permission.

The rapid economic development over two and a half decades has lifted millions out of poverty and seen China emerging increasingly prosperous and confident. With China's entering into the WTO in 2001, “past speculations about China as a world economic power in the 21st century have become a reality few would dispute anymore” (Tsui & Lau, 2002). However, the rapid pace of change has not been without its costs. According to China Briefing (http://www.asiasociety.org), a growing economic gap has opened up between the prosperous coastal regions of the east and the poverty-stricken western hinterland. Even within the more prosperous regions, economic inequality is becoming more pronounced. Unemployment is also rising. All these problems, fortunately, have been put on the agenda of the ruling Party, and the development of the country's west is already under way.

Politics

Under China's socialist political and economic system, the government was explicitly responsible for planning and managing the national economic. A major portion of the governmental apparatus was devoted to managing the economy; all but a few of the more than 10 ministries, commissions, administrations, bureaus, academies, and corporations under the State Council were concerned with economic matters (see The State Council, Chap. 10).

Under the old system, economic policies and decisions adopted by the National People's Congress and the State Council were passed on to the economic organizations under the State Council, which incorporated them into the plans for the various sectors of the economy. Each of the economic organizations under the State Council directed the units under its jurisdiction through subordinate offices at the provincial and local levels. A major objective of the reform was to reduce the use of direct controls and to increase the role of indirect economic levers. By 1987, the majority of state-owned industrial enterprises, which were managed at the provincial level or below, were partially regulated by a combination of specific allocations and indirect controls, and the planned economy is shifting increasingly to the market-oriented economy.

Starr (1997), author of a guidebook on China, wrote:

The constitution itself, the fifth since the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949, is “probably best understood as a mission statement or policy platform with a finite duration” (Starr, 1997, p. 60) rather than laws for regulating behaviors.

Culture

Because culture is the major theme of the chapter, it is discussed in more detail. We mentioned earlier that Confucianism is the root of the Chinese culture. As such, many of the Chinese cultural characteristics are related to the four virtues discussed previously. To a certain extent, we can say that the Chinese society is structured around webs of social relationships (Bian, 1994), and Chinese people all live in an invisible network of guanxi (relationships or ties). When dealing with relationships, one has to be careful with renqing (individually internalized sense of moral responsibility) and mianzi (face). All these can be viewed as major Chinese cultural characteristics and have deep roots in Confucianism.

Guanxi. The Chinese term is used in this chapter instead of the word relationship, because guanxi has a much more involved connotation than the latter. “Guanxi ties people together according to the specific relationship between these people” (Hui & Graen, 1997, p. 454). A survey of Chinese citizens conducted a few years ago showed that 92% affirmed the importance of guanxi in their daily lives, and 72% preferred to use guanxi connections over normal bureaucratic channels to advance personal interests and solve problems (Yeung & Tung, 1996). Western business people who have done some business with China also know that companies wanting to get in on the ground floor in China need guanxi in addition to planning, funding, and a good product (Murphy, 1996).

The reason guanxi is so important is because China is a country “ruled by people” (ren zhi) not by law, and the predefined nature of guanxi dictates the behavior. The notion of rule by people can be seen as a result of the belief in morality as defined under Confucianism. According to Confucius, governance by ethics (li zhi) is preferred over governance by law (fa zhi), and people follow ethics, making China ruled by people. The reliance on people rather than law would naturally promote the practice of guanxi, because an individual (rather than institutional authority) defines what is permissible in a given context at a particular time. Even the central government deals with provincial and municipal governments by means of myriad of ad hoc agreements made after complex bargaining negotiations. As Lee Kuan Yew, former premier of the Republic of Singapore, put it, the Chinese use guanxi “to make up for the lack of the rule of law and transparency in rules and regulations” (Yeung & Tung, 1996, p. 56). To some extent, it is correct to say that without guanxi, nothing happens in China (Murphy, 1996).

Renqing and Mianzi. We explained earlier that the notion of renqing is one of the Confucius virtues, and mianzi is almost inseparable from renqing. Generally speaking, renqing indicates the emotional responses of an individual confronting the various situations of daily life (Hwang, 1987). Individuals are expected to control their anger, hatred, and desire, because the notion of renqing is reciprocal and a person is believed to be treated however the person treats others. Also, if the person lets his or her emotions take over, she or he will cause the other to lose “face.” Over a hundred years ago, Arthur Smith pointed out that in China the word face does not signify simply the front part of the head, but is “literally a compound noun of multitude, with more meanings than we shall be able to describe, or perhaps to comprehend” (Smith, 1894, p. 16).

There is a Chinese saying that “mianze is like the bark of a tree; without which, the tree dies.” People who have lost mianzi in Confucian societies are more than social outcasts. A loss of mianzi brings shame not only to the individuals, but also to their family members, leaving them unable to function in society (Yeung & Tung, 1996). In Chinese history, there are people who have actually killed themselves in order to save face. A district magistrate in the Ming Dynasty, as a special favor, was allowed to be beheaded in his robes of office in order to save face (Smith, 1894).

Swaak (1995, p. 43) pointed out that the Chinese value the notion of mianzi because it allows them to maintain their esteem and personal dignity. It is a difficult value to comprehend for people who believe in being direct and open. But in China, you can cause someone to lose mianzi, esteem, or personal dignity by saying exactly what you mean or feel. In turn, the person who has lost mianzi may—indirectly—make you lose mianzi without you knowing it. This is because Confucianism provides a prescribed response to most situations and individuals are judged by the way they use these prescribed patterns of behavior when dealing with other people. So long as the person conforms to the expected behaviors this person's face is maintained. The loss of mianzi occurs when the prescribed expectations are not met. This is still true to this day. For example, friends are expected to help each other out in times of difficulty. If Person A asks his friend, Person B, for help and Person B cannot or does not give the help, then Person B is not giving Person the face, and Person A would feel that he lost his face.

The concept of mianzi is especially intriguing because it also involves the influence of other cultural notions. For example, the Chinese vastly prefer consensus to a simple majority rule when making a decision. If people have different views about a decision, they will keep pushing the decision to higher authorities until a unanimous consensus is reached, so that people whose opinions were rejected by peers would not lose face. Here the concern for mianzi is mixed with the belief in high power distance. It is that belief that makes succumbing to the higher authority easier than agreeing with peers. In addition to guanxi, renqing. and mianzi, another much-emphasized phenomenon in Chinese culture is the notion of political morality, which too is historically rooted in Confucianism.

Political Morality. Throughout China's history, political thought has been one of the essential branches of literature. Moral forces are the means by which “this incomputable mass of human beings, dwelling on the Chinese plains from the dawn of history has until now, been controlled,” and made itself “an exception to the universal law of the decay and death of nations” (Smith, 1894, p. 287). Unlike in the West, where the source of morality is the individual conscience, in China morality fixes social norms as well as individual codes of behavior, and in doing so it plays the role that religion does in the West (Tom, 1989).

For Confucius, morality and government were so closely related that it was scarcely possible to think about them separately. According to Confucius: “Lead the people with governmental measures and regulate them with laws and punishment, and they will avoid wrongdoing but will have no sense of honor and shame. Lead them with virtue and regulate them by the rules of propriety, and they will have a sense of shame and, moreover, set themselves right” (Confucius, 1992, 2:3).

Throughout Chinese history, political thought has been one of the essential branches of literature. The extensive coverage in the media on various types of meetings is good evidence. In ancient China, emperors and government officers were also scholars. The late Chairman Mao Zedong himself wrote poems and studied calligraphy. In fact, the construction of political morality is one of the three tasks of the Communist Party, and weekly meetings to discuss moral issues are routine in all types of organizations everywhere in China. Often the deputy president or director in an organization is specialized in handling the work of political morality. These people are expected to act somewhat like fathers in churches or clinical psychologists (even though they are not trained as such), listening to people's problems and providing advice when they can, but often they are also expected to find the necessary resources and help solve practical problems.

Summary

The preceding section has provided a very brief overview of China's history, economy, politics, and culture. In particular, it talks about the few characteristics that have made the Chinese culture “unique” and somewhat “difficult” for Western people to understand. Although the past two decades’ rapid development has dramatically turned China from a poverty-driven country to a new rising economic power, China itself has remained “unchanged” (Chine, 1999, p. 34) in many ways, and the state paternalism is still a dominant feature of China's business environment. According to Child and Tse (2001), “so long as China retains its one-party system, this feature is likely to persist” (p. 17). Chinese people, on the other hand, are still largely clinging to the traditional values (see Goldman, 1994; Ralston, Egri, Stewart, Terpstra, & Yu, 1999; Ralston, Gustafson, Terpstra, & Holt, 1995; Ralston et al., 1993) and “Confucianism is now again at the core of the national essence that is being rediscovered, reinvented, and re-embraced today” (People's Daily, 1994).

However, Chinese business leaders, living and working under the Chinese Communist Party, are also exposed to communist ideology, which discourages autocratic and dictatorial leadership. Leaders are encouraged to show concerns for their followers, respect them, and are expected to sacrifice themselves for their followers. Furthermore, the country has been going through an unprecedented influence of Western management philosophies (Chen, 1995). Naturally, in addition to the Confucius values, the influence of Communist and Western managerial values would also be obvious. In the following section, we present the Chinese results of the GLOBE societal cultural survey, which show the influence of the multiple values we stated previously.

4.  GLOBE FINDINGS ABOUT CHINESE SOCIETAL CULTURE

The Chinese data of the GLOBE Project were collected in Shanghai, which is the largest industrial city in China. Shanghai was selected as the research site because of its rapid development and strategic position in China. With a population of 13 million people, a well-developed infrastructure for utilities, communications, and all forms of commercial transportations, and a political climate conducive to foreign investment (Fung, Yan & Nin, 1992), Shanghai serves as an ideal environment to investigate changes in values and implications of such changes in managerial practices. Whether development in Shanghai can be generalized and extended to the rest of China is an unresolved question, but there is a strong case for similar patterns of economic development and increased foreign investment throughout China's urban centers and coastal port cities (Ralston et al., 1995).

A total of 158 responses were collected from middle managers working in the finance industry (77) and food industry (81).¹ Table 24.1 presents China's mean scores on each of the cultural dimensions “As Is” (the perceived practices in society) and “Should Be” (how the society should be in an ideal situation). Next to the mean scores are the rankings of the scores in reference to the other scores by the 61 participating countries (for the purpose of the research, regions like Hong Kong are also referred to as countries). Also presented in Table 24.1 are the absolute differences between the “As Is” score and the “Should Be” score, the highest and lowest mean scores on each of the dimensions.

Performance Orientation. Performance Orientation refers to the degree to which a society encourages and rewards group members for performance improvement and achievement of excellence. According to House, Javidan, Hanges, and Dorfman (2002) and House et al. (2004), GLOBE's Performance Orientation is similar to Hofstede and Bond's (1988) Confucian work dynamism, which focuses on social hierarchy, protecting the status quo, and personal virtue. The Chinese score was among the higher ranking countries on “As Is” (4.45, Rank 13), which is supportive of the traditional Chinese culture in which hard work and diligence were highly praised and appreciated. When describing the same value as how it “Should Be,” the average scores among other countries are much higher than those on “As Is.” The Chinese score was also higher than its score on “As Is” (5.67 vs. 4.45). However, the score was much lower compared to those of other countries (ranked 50th out of 61 compared to the 13th out of 61 on “As Is”).

TABLE 24.1
Results of GLOBE Societal Value Survey

^aThe rank order for China relative to the 61 societies. ^bAbsolute difference between the “As Is” and “Should Be” scores. ^cLetters A to D represent statistically different clusters of countries (Bands) with A > B > C > D (cf. Hanges, Dickson, & Sipe, 2004).

Like China, the scores of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan on Performance Orientation “As Is” were among the highest ranking countries (2, 3, and 8, respectively) and their scores on Performance Orientation “Should Be” were higher than their scores on “As Is,” but their respective rankings are also much lower compared to their rankings on “As Is” (48, 52, and 46, respectively). In other words, the discrepancies between the “As Is” and “Should Be” scores for the four Chinese-speaking societies are all low. To find out the more accurate explanation to the reason will require much more investigation, but a couple of possible reasons might be: (a) the tendency for the Chinese people to score toward the mean as a result of the influence by the “doctrine of the mean” (although no response bias has been identified for the Chinese sample for this dimensions; Javidan, 2004, p. 250); (b) the Chinese people think good performance is already highly encouraged, (c) the Chinese, being more collectivistic, may not like extreme emphasis on encouraging individual performances.

Future Orientation. The Future Orientation dimension in the GLOBE instrument measures values and beliefs pertaining to long-term orientation (e.g., delaying gratification, planning, and investing in the future). The results showed that Chinese managers’ score on Future Orientation “As Is” (3.75) ranked about the middle (34) among the 61 countries; whereas their score on Future Orientation “Should Be” (4.73) ranked 60, which is next to the lowest among the 61 countries. Hofstede (1993) pointed out that Chinese culture is long-term oriented. China is a farming country, and for farmers, planning long-term means to save as much as you can and thriftiness was a virtue cherished in the traditional agricultural society that forms the backbone of China (Cheung et al., 1996). But the GLOBE items on this dimension do not capture thrift or saving. If we look at the dimension as emphasizing on conscientiously planning for the future, this might be a reason for the low score.

Unlike most religious societies, the Chinese society does not have a dominant religion, but it was exposed to multiple schools of thought in ancient times and people have the habit of using often seemingly contradictory principles to rationalize their thinking when necessary. Whereas Confucianism encouraged people to be thrifty and to think long-term, the founder of Taoism, Lao Zi, opined that the cosmos is uncertain, and therefore we had better leave things alone, letting things take their natural course. To him, planning is both unnecessary and against nature.

Another possible reason might be due to the high level of uncertainties caused by the too many changes in China. Take the saving habit, for example. Chinese people used to put into the bank every single penny they could spare. But now that the government has dropped the interest rate to such a low level in order to stimulate expenditure there is no incentive to save anymore. Therefore, it may be safe to say that the current situation in China discourages people to think long-term. As Cherry Li, a middle-level manager in a U.S.-owned Chinese company who was getting on-the-job training in the U.S. said: “Americans pay a lot of attention to individual development. They have ‘road maps’ for individuals and try to lay ahead where you are going to be in the next five years. We Chinese don't do that at all. We watch our steps as we walk along. How can we plan ahead when we don't even know which company we'll be working for in the next five years?” (Li, 1997, personal communication). It is suggested that further research is required in order to decipher the real reason.

Assertiveness. Assertiveness measures the degree to which individuals in a society are assertive, dominant, and aggressive in social relationships. China has traditionally been a male-dominant society. Until modern times, men in China were always superior to women. Being a woman in China meant being a servant to the men in their lives—“first father, then husband, then son”—and there has been a long-standing prejudice against females in China although literature relevant to masculinity ideology in China is quite sparse (Levant, Wu, & Fischer, 1996). In fact, even to this day, traditional masculinity ideology is still endorsed highly as shown in the Levant et al. study. Masculine behaviors such as assertiveness, dominance, and aggression should therefore be highly acceptable in China.

In fact, a number of studies, which included the United States, Hong Kong, China, and Taiwan, found Chinese more masculine and assertive than Americans (Schmit & Yeh, 1992; Shermerhorn & Bond, 1991). However, literature on unique Chinese cultural concepts such as mianzi (face; maintaining the respect of others as well as to respect others), renqing (being kind or respecting the feelings of other people), and guanxi (relatedness or connections among individuals) strongly indicate otherwise. These terms distinguish the Chinese from other cultures (Bond, 1991). They constrain the behaviors of Chinese individuals and discourage them from behaving assertively. The conflict of interests may explain the large discrepancy between China's two scores on assertiveness “As Is” (3.76) and “Should Be” (5.44). The respective “As Is” ranking (51 out of 61) indicates that the respondents did not think Chinese society encouraged individuals to be assertive. However, the Chinese score on how society should value such behavior ranked 2nd highest among the 61 scores, showing that Chinese managers have a much stronger desire for the society to value assertive behavior in comparison to others. An accurate explanation of the discrepancy between the two scores requires further study, but a plausible reason that the current Chinese society has a lower level of assertiveness than many other societies could be because Chinese managers are still influenced by their concerns for notions such as renqing (emotional responses), guanxi (relations or ties), and mianzi (face), whereas their strong aspirations for such behavior could be due to the fact that rapid changes in society created an extremely high level of uncertainty, urging Chinese people to become increasingly aggressive in order to protect themselves.

Institutional Collectivism. This scale measures the degree to which individuals are encouraged by societal institutions to be integrated into broader entities, such as the extended family, the firm, or the village. For centuries, the individual as an end in itself was de-emphasized in Chinese society. Instead, the network of obligations and responsibilities as a group member of the society was emphasized (Chew & Putti, 1995). As Michael Bond (1991) described it: “Chinese think of themselves using more group-related concepts (such as attentive to others) than Americans do; and they see their ideal ‘self’ as being closer to their social (or interpersonal) self than Westerners do” (p. 34). Based on these traditional values, it would be natural for one to expect China to score relatively higher on this dimension.

Consistent with the assumption, the Chinese score on Institutional Collectivism “As Is” (4.77) was among the highest, ranking 7th among the 61 countries, meaning Chinese society is very collectivistic. The Chinese score on Institutional Collectivism “Should Be” (4.56), however, is slightly lower compared to the “As Is” score. Although it ranked in the middle (36 among the 61 countries), the absolute difference between the two scores was very minimal (0.21). The relative discrepancy to other countries may be the result of the changes taking place in China, especially within the business context, which is particularly likely to be picked up by sampling from a managerial population. Like many other Chinese cultural ideologies that are being threatened by the acceptance of Western views, the collectivistic orientation, too, is being challenged. For example, the extremely egalitarian practices that were derived from the collectivistic orientation and that were preached in China for decades are now often being rejected and replaced by more equitable standards (Chen, 1995). Individual contributions are now being acknowledged and rewarded. However, overall, people's values in collectivism are still quite consistent with the traditional values.

In-Group Collectivism. The second collectivism, labeled In-Group Collectivism, measures the degree to which members of a society take pride in membership in small groups such as their family and circle of close friends, and the organizations and units in which they are employed. Like its scores on the Institutional Collectivism dimension, Chinese scores on In-Group Collectivism “As Is” (5.80, ranked 9th) were slightly higher than the scores on family cohesiveness “Should Be” (5.09, ranked 58th). The absolute difference between the two scores is bigger than that for Institutional Collectivism. However, the reasons for the discrepancy are similar to the ones discussed previously. The concept of family has always been important to the Chinese people. Pursuit of individual interests at the sacrifice of families has always been discouraged. In China, altruism and loyalty, loyalty to parents at home and to bosses at work, are values that the society tries very hard to instill in children. A close parent–children relationship is a virtue that is widely respected and valued. “Chinese parents take great interest in their children throughout their lives, and their children, imbued with the doctrine of filial piety, are constantly reminded of their filial duty towards their parents” (Chao, 1983, p. 72). Most Chinese children live with their parents until they get married. Very often even after they get married, if they do not have a place to live, they continue to live with their parents. In many rural areas, new extensions are made to the house when male children get married. The tradition that all children live under the same roof is still kept there. So the current practice reflects the lingering influence of the traditional values.

The reforms, nevertheless, have forced the Chinese to take care of themselves. A study that compared values held by Chinese managers before and after the Tian An Men Square incident in 1989 found a growing spirit of “Chinese-style” individualism, which is “tempered by cultural relationships and centralized controls, yet compatible with Western values” (Ralston et al., 1995, p. 15). Young people are becoming increasingly independent. They move away from their parents as soon as they can. At work, they are no longer constrained to the organization, and therefore can “afford” not to be loyal to their employers. The increasing divorce rate and the one-child-per-family policy also make it impossible to maintain some of the traditional values of a family. That is probably a good reason explaining why the Chinese score on In-Group Collectivism “Should Be” is much lower than its score on In-Group Collectivism “As Is.”

Gender Egalitarianism. Gender Egalitarianism refers to the extent to which a society minimizes gender role differences. It measures the level of stereotype held by a society that favors one gender over the other (House et al., 2002). A lower score favors male-oriented behaviors, a middle score means egalitarian values, and a higher score favors female-oriented behaviors. Chinese scores on both Gender Egalitarianism “As Is” (3.05) and “Should Be” (3.68) are low, indicating that the society favors men more (ranking 48th among scores on “As Is” and 58th on “Should Be”). In fact, the two means are also very close to each other. There are historical reasons for such obvious favor for the men.

In China, despite all the economic advances, the majority of the population is still poor and a large proportion still depends heavily on farming and on men for labor. In these places, women are still discouraged in education or employment except as “wet nurses, maids, or cooks” (Chia, Moore, Lam, Chuang, & Cheng, 1994, p. 25). Women still lag behind men in terms of salary, job benefits, and job privileges (Eaton, 1998; Shaffer, Joplin, Bell, Lau, & Oguz, 2000).

Gender Egalitarianism may not happen until China becomes more economically developed. People in rural areas may still have to rely on men for heavy manual labor, and it will be hard for the Chinese to treat the two genders equally when one is, in practice, more useful than the other. Until the majority of the population is liberated from the land and women become more independent, the bias in favor of men will remain.

Uncertainty Avoidance. Uncertainty Avoidance indicates the extent to which people seek orderliness, consistency, structure to cover situations in their daily lives, try to avoid uncertain and ambiguous situations by reliance on social norms and procedures and belief in absolute truths and the attainment of expertise (House et al., 2002; 2004). As can be seen in Table 24.1, China's two scores on Uncertainty Avoidance are fairly consistent between “As Is” (4.94) and “Should Be” (5.28), ranking 10th and 9th, respectively.

The high Chinese scores are consistent with the traditional Chinese value of order. Starting with Confucius, who thought the “Golden Age is in the past” (Smith, 1894, p. 115), the Chinese seek peace and security by clinging to the past. Under that kind of mind-set and being exclusively shut off from the rest of the world, the Chinese people's creativity withered like flowers deprived of sunshine and water. For centuries, Chinese people were comfortable and felt secure only when they “played-it-safe.” It may sound bizarre to Westerners, actually ridiculous even to us Chinese now, but it was unfortunately true that during the 1960s and 1970s people in China were led to seek “unity and order” to such a degree that they would run their businesses the same way year after year without change, maintaining the same structure, the same products, the same everything. They even wore clothes in the same uniform color, making the country either “a sea of blue” or “a sea of green.” Therefore, if one understands the long history and the traditional values of order, one should have no problem understanding why the current Chinese society has such a high intolerance for uncertainty.

The Chinese's strong desire to see more order in society, as reflected in their high score on “Should Be,” reflects the anxiety caused by the unprecedented changes going on in China. It is true that all Chinese people enjoy the better living they have now and welcome change in that sense, but many of them are worried about the loss of “order,” therefore longing for more rules and regulations to reduce uncertainties.

Power Distance. Power Distance measures the extent to which a culture accepts inequalities between various groups within a culture such as social classes and organizational hierarchy (House et al., 2002). The two Chinese scores on Power Distance “As Is” (5.04) and “Should Be” (3.10) showed the largest discrepancy among the nine pairs of scores. In fact, scores of all countries on “Should Be” were lower than “As Is,” showing a common desire that people in all these countries aspire for more equality than they currently have. The relatively higher ranked Chinese “Should Be” score (12th) compared to “As Is” (41st) among the 61 countries may indicate that, compared to managers from other countries, the Chinese managers demonstrate a higher level of tolerance for inequality of power in society. The discrepancy between China's two scores may be viewed as an indicator of the existing two forces: while the internal forces from the still highly-respected traditional values are pulling the Chinese business leaders away from becoming competitive, the external pressures form an opposite force, pushing these leaders toward becoming increasingly competitive.

The influence of Western democracy in recent years has made the younger Chinese strive for equality in power. More and more, they break away from the traditional norms that restricted their behaviors, such as absolute respect for the senior and obedience. The reformed system has also made it possible for them to do many things they could not, or dared not, do before. For example, they can quit their jobs for better opportunities now. They can look for jobs themselves instead of having to be assigned by the government. They no longer have to work in places where they were born, but can work thousands of miles away from home without being punished. So the score on “As Is” was surprisingly lower than previous studies have reported.

Nevertheless, the influence of traditional values can still be observed among middle managers. As stated earlier in the chapter, in ancient China, people were born with status and it was a virtue for subordinates to show respect for their superiors. Until the early 1980s, it was “dangerous and self-destructive to struggle openly against persons whose authority over one is broadly approved” (Bond, 1991, p. 35). The reforms have changed people's behaviors on the surface, but deep inside, their values, which were formed at an early stage in life, are still there. Even now, people holding official titles are still addressed formally and deferentially in China. Social rights and privileges are still closely tied to one's status. The higher Chinese score on Power Distance “Should Be” may indicate the lingering influence of traditional values for hierarchical power and order.

Humane Orientation. Humane Orientation measures the degree to which a society encourages and rewards individuals for being fair, altruistic, generous, caring, and kind to others (House et al., 2002). Being humane is consistent with the Confucian principles of moderation and human heartedness. The GLOBE results show that Chinese participants scored among the higher ranking countries on Humane Orientation “As Is” (4.36, rank 17) but China's score dropped much lower when describing how much they thought Humane Orientation “Should Be” (5.32) valued by their society (rank 39). This result shows another paradoxical situation: Because the notion of humane is closely related to ren (benevolent, kind), one of the “five constant virtues,” so people are expected to be kind and humane, and yet the future values as perceived by middle managers seem to push the Chinese culture away from that.

Traditionally, the Chinese people think it is more important to maintain a harmonious environment than to get a job done on time. A person high on Humane Orientation would be described as having a strong sense of renqing in China, which implies an “implicit set of rules” that involve reciprocation in the form of money, goods, information, status, service, and affection (Cheung et al., 1996). Under these rules, two basic kinds of social behavior are expected: (a) ordinarily, one should keep in contact with acquaintances in one's social network, exchanging gifts, greetings, or visitations with them from time to time, and (b) when a member of one's network gets into trouble or faces a difficult situation, one should sympathize, offer help, and “do a renqing” for that person (Hwang, 1987, p. 954). All those expectations urge Chinese individuals to be kind and considerate to others.

However, the society is going through so much change and the ways in which things used to get done are all being reformed, creating an extreme amount of uncertainties. Many traditional values are also being challenged by realities and people there find it increasingly important to be assertive and aggressive in order to survive. Therefore, the notion of being kind and maintaining harmony with others is not as important as it used to be. Maybe that is why the score on Humane Orientation “Should Be” dropped so much from the “As Is” score.

Summary

From the preceding discussion, we can see that the current Chinese culture still heavily reflects the influence of Confucianism ideologies. However, there seem to be historical as well as contemporary reasons for current Chinese society to be so intolerant of uncertainties, relatively more collectivistic oriented, more humane, and comparatively unassertive and still favor men more than women. We compared data from the food industry and the finance industry, but the results showed that none of the pairs of scores differed significantly, indicating the representativeness of the views on the societal values.

How do these values affect leadership behaviors? What are the implications of this profile for leadership in Chinese society? The GLOBE project studied the effect of cultural values on effectiveness of leadership behaviors. In the following sections, we first give a general overview of leadership in China. We then tell stories of two royal ministers and one more recent leader, the first premier of the new China, to show the permanence of the Chinese culture and its persistent influence on its leaders over the thousands of years.

5.  LEADERSHIP IN CHINA

The idea of business leadership is a new product of the economic reform that started about 20 years ago. The view of leadership as a science did not exist previously. This is due largely to the planned economic system prevalent in prereform China. When the new China was founded in 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted state socialism. In doing so, the Chinese government followed the central ideological tenet of socialism, which emphasized collective ownership and identity. Under that system, the state and the Party were supposed to represent the interests of the working class as a general collective, thus legitimizing the hierarchical control of organizations. Business enterprises followed the plans set up by the planners. Their objectives were to do nothing but to fulfill or exceed the quota the government established. They paid part of their profits, rather than tax, to the government. So there was not much for the leaders to do at the organizational level in terms of leadership so long as their businesses fulfilled the production quota (Fu & Wu, 2000).

Figure 24.1 describes the relationships among dan wei (organizations) at various levels. As can be seen in the figure, all organizations in China were under different industrial bureaus or government agencies under the central government. Each industry had a ministry at the top overseeing the overall performance of all the factories under its auspices. For example, the Capital Steel Complex belonged to the Ministry of Metallurgy. Yanshan Petrochemical Factory belonged to the Ministry of Chemistry. Leaders in business organizations were also administratively parallel to department leaders in government agencies. For example, leaders in large state-level enterprises could be ministry-level or deputy ministry-level leaders. Such comparability made it possible for the personnel system to operate the way it did.

The reform in China terminated the planned economic system and instilled a market economy with socialist characteristics in the country. The past two decades have pushed China's metamorphosis into a hybrid economic system with many forms of corporate governance and economic control (ownership): state-owned companies, collectives, township and village enterprises, joint ventures, solely foreign-owned enterprises, private and individual enterprises. The Chinese central government has been trying very hard to separate government from business practices so that businesses can follow the rules under the market economy. State-owned companies have lost their reliable support, having to become economically independent entities, which must find ways to survive by themselves. As a result, the term leadership in China has gained meaning and substance. Leaders who used to be followers of orders from the central authorities found themselves having to be accountable and to lead in order to keep their companies going (Fu & Wu, 2000).

The pressure to transition from managers into leaders has brought new challenges to the business leaders and has also changed people's expectations in leaders as well. However, many of the qualities that Chinese people expect to see in their leaders are surprisingly similar to what well-respected leaders throughout history displayed. In the following section, we introduce three Chinese leaders who lived in a period of 1,500 years to illustrate our point.

Stories of Three Leaders

Famous leaders in China are like stars in the sky, which are bright and visible, but too many to count. The three leaders we chose lived in different times but shared very similar characteristics and have been very well respected to this day. The two royal ministers are compared to today's business leaders because there were no parallel business organizations then, and they were responsible for decision making in the sense contemporary business leaders do, according to Managing Crises in Northern Song Dynasty (Wang, 1998). The information about the two ministers is taken from Biographies of Famous Chinese Generals (1987).

Zhu-Ge Liang of the Eastern Han Dynasty. Zhu-Ge Liang (181–234), minister of the Shu kingdom of the Eastern Han Dynasty, has been a role model for generation after generation. The Han Dynasty was the period in Chinese history that witnessed the most fighting among the warlords. Zhu-Ge lost his parents when very young and lived a secluded life in his early days, studying war strategies by reading all sorts of books. At an early age, he was already known for his extreme intelligence and broad knowledge. As a result, Liu Bei, who was an offspring of a royal family and later became the ruler of the kingdom, went to Zhe-Ge three times in person to invite him to come out of seclusion and be his adviser. Touched by Liu's sincerity, Zhu-Ge eventually did so, determined to fight with Liu Bei to restore the lost kingdom.

Zhu-Ge's life can be divided into two parts. In the first part, he led the army fighting for the establishment of the Shu Kingdom, and in the second part, he did all he could to enable the most incapable son of Liu Bei to rule the country after Liu died. During the last few years of his life, he continued leading armies to attack the neighboring Wei Kingdom even though all his attempts failed. He fought endlessly, knowing he would not succeed. He wrote down his reasons for these attacks, explaining to the incapable son of the late emperor that what he did was to protect the Kingdom of Shu from being destroyed by the powerful Wei. Although Zhu-Ge is regarded as a legalist rather than a Confucian, his efforts were surprisingly similar to those of Confucius, who kept leading his students touring around the country, trying to persuade the rulers to adopt the ceremonies of the Zhou dynasty, knowing they would not listen. Because of his unyielding determination, despite many failures, Zhu-Ge has been remembered as an extremely intelligent man, as well as a faithful and devoted minister. His quote “ju gong jing cui, si er hou yi” (I have no regret when I die if I did all I could possibly do) has been greatly respected and is still frequently cited. Modern people use the saying to encourage the self-sacrificing and hard-working spirit. The Communist Party also uses Zhu-Ge's saying to encourage its members to be devoted and faithful.

Sima of the Song Dynasty. Sima Guang (1019–1086) was also a famous minister. Besides being an administrative officer, he was a thinker, a literary man, and a historian. Sima Guang is known for his broad knowledge and hard-working spirit. He started reading classics at 6 and received a very restrictive family education. To this day, Chinese people still read stories about him using a round piece of wood as a pillow to prevent himself from sleeping too deeply. Because of the pillow, Sima Guang would easily wake up when turning his body around at night and would continue reading. His hard-working spirit made him a local government officer at the age of 20 and an officer of the central government at 27.

A faithful believer of Confucianism, Sima Guang was always honest and straightforward with his opinions. Politically, he advocated cultivating people with ceremonies and rituals and being merciful to them. He was determined to build an ideal Confucian society by reducing or eliminating taxes, cutting down government expenses, and establishing special storehouses to provide aid to people in bad years. Sima Guang was such a firm believer of Confucian doctrines and had such a stubborn personality that he stepped down twice from his positions when he could not pursue his ideals. After leaving his official position the second time, Sima Guang concentrated on writing the “Conclusions on Reading the Mirror of History,” in which he elaborated a theory of social evolution, exalted national heroes and denounced traitors in all ages, and dissected the failings of bureaucratic society. In 1085, one year before his death, he became a minister once again and reversed all the reforms made by another reformist. He was a genuine Confucian scholar and fought hard till death stopped him. When cleaning up his effects, his family members found unfinished papers that he was writing to report to the emperor. People compared him to Zhu-Ge Liang for his selfless devotion and hard-working spirit. Like Zhu-Ge, Sima was also highly respected for maintaining the Confucian ideology and has been regarded as a good model for standing up for his conviction and fighting for his beliefs at all costs. His case also shows that true loyalty is not manifested by complete obedience to emperors or masters, but by standing firm for righteousness, which is an essential part of the Confucius virtues.

Zhou Enlai of Modern China. Very few Westerners may know Zhu-Ge Liang or Sima Guang, but many have heard the name of Zhou Enlai. The former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who found Zhou “one of the two or three most impressive men” he had ever met, called him “urbane, infinitely patient, extraordinarily intelligent, subtle” (Wilson, 1984, p.17).

To the 1.2 billion Chinese, Zhou was their “beloved Premier.” For 27 years, Zhou was the only premier of the nation. He understood people's problems and sympathized with their painful plight. People adored him, simply loved him. January 8, 1976, the day he died, seized the nation with grief. The mourning for him spread all over the country, with his pictures hung on walls, in the streets, and in the homes of millions. In the few days that followed, people everywhere sang songs and recited poems in tribute to his memory and to express their love for him. The singers’ tears flowed as they sang; so did the listeners’. Zhou touched the masses to the extent of a spontaneous show of love and affection.

Why would an individual have such an enormous power to capture the heart of billions? To put it simply, Zhou was everything the Chinese people worship. He was “gentle, honest and uncomplicated” to the people (Chang, 1984, p. 41). He was “loyal, selfless, open and straightforward, modest and prudent” (Deng, 1976, p. 1) to his comrades-in-arms in the central Chinese government. In the classical Chinese tradition, he would have been called a “perfect man” because he conformed to the expected behaviors. Although by classical Confucian standards, Zhou would not be considered a good Confucian because he did not stand up for what is right, but his life exemplified many of the fine qualities advocated by Confucianism and praised in history over the thousands of years.

Zhou was a pragmatic communist who was determined irrevocably by both broad conviction and current expediency to give his full loyalty to the Party and its policies in spite of his personal reservations. He did the best he could in terms of damage control, exercising the doctrine of the mean. At an early age, he had proven himself a leader of tact, reconciliation, personal integrity, and self-assurance. He retained a popular respect throughout his entire career as a Chinese statesman from 1927 to his death in 1976 and became “China's man for all seasons, a complex, charming, and intelligent character, who embodies many of the contradictions of an ancient land in rapid transition” (Dittmer, 1978, p. 459).

Summary. Brief as these vignettes are, they gave a general picture of the three men who lived in a period of almost 1,500 years. Admittedly, the descriptions tend to oversimplify the historical events and the interpretation of their leadership behaviors probably should not be as straightforward as depicted in the chapter. They are not meant to represent all generals/premiers in Chinese history. However, for the purpose of this chapter, they are to show the uninterrupted influence of Confucius values and some of the qualities they shared despite of the different times they lived.

All three individuals were highly intelligent people, studied hard, and were known as well-learned men. They firmly followed their beliefs and were all extremely loyal to their superiors. They all conformed to Confucian's “five constant virtues.” Their behaviors were consistent throughout their lives and they were well respected by their peers, and by people who survived them. Surprisingly, the qualities these three people displayed are still very much those that the Chinese people respect in current China despite all the material changes that have taken place in the country as shown in the later sections.

In the following sections, we introduce the results of three focus group interviews with some middle managers in Shanghai to show that many of the desired qualities have remained unchanged although some are different as a result of the reform. We then introduce the results from the Chinese GLOBE project to provide some quantitative support for the findings from the interviews.

Results of Focus Group Interviews

Three focus group interviews were conducted with managers from the same or similar organizations in Shanghai where the questionnaire survey data were collected in the spring of 1997. The focus group interviews were conducted to explore qualitatively, the desired leadership attributes and behaviors and to find out what kinds of values influence the thinking and behavior of business leadership in China. The first group consisted of 7 managers from 7 different organizations including heavy industry, service, and government agencies. The second group consisted of 12 managers from 12 companies under a large service-oriented corporation. The corporation started 10 years ago and has become one of the four largest corporations in the industry since the company was publicly traded in 1992. The third group consisted of 6 managers from a food-manufacturing corporation. The majority of the participants were middle managers; a few were higher-level managers. Of the 25 people, 6 were women, and the rest were male managers, with an average age of 40 years.

The interviewees’ answers to the focal question, “What are the qualities of your ideal leader?”, were all recorded and transcribed. The most emphasized was the quality of the leader, including honesty, trustworthiness, and integrity. Interviewees unanimously agreed that without a high level of integrity no leader can hope to establish high level of credibility, and without credibility no leader can hope to be effective. The following summarized a few other major characteristics people described during the interviews.

A Good Leader Knows How to Balance Between Being Conservative and Aggressive. Conservative and aggressive sound opposite to each other because aggressiveness is highly discouraged: It is against the essential Confucian ideologies, and yet to be effective in the increasingly competitive business world, business leaders have to be aggressive. Leaders had to be conservative under the planned economy, because “At that time if you followed the orders and did what you were told to do, you would be a good leader.” But nowadays, one also needs to be assertive because “you have to take the responsibility and make sure that the market accepts the products your people make.” According to the focus group respondents, however, a balance between the two is necessary because the Chinese are “crossing the water by feeling out the way.” There is no precedence to most of the things the Chinese are doing; therefore, “you have to be conservative while being assertive.”

One example given was a 50-year-old Party secretary and director:

The balance between two seemingly contradictory values may be consistent with the large discrepancy between Assertiveness “As Is” and “Should Be” in the value survey we discussed earlier.

A Good Leader Must Have a Vision, Must Be Able to Look Far Ahead. The term visionary leadership is new in the Chinese vocabulary according to the result of a media analysis that compared desired leadership attributes in two national newspapers over 20 years (Fu & Tsui, 2003). Confucians certainly would not emphasize visionary because emperors were the only real decision makers. And under the planned economy, the hierarchical power structure also made it impossible for managers to have a vision. But now things are different. One of the interviewees used one of his former bosses as an example to illustrate the difference in expectations:

The example shows that even though managers still relate compliance to the notion of face, being able to lead is obviously considered more important than to win followers’ compliance.

Another example showed how being visionary is recognized. One of the subdivisions under the Municipal Economic Commission is in the oil business and has been very successful for the past few years. Two years ago, Mr. Wang was named the director of the division. As soon as he got there, he foresaw the increasing competition as a result of the growing automobile market and decided to build 20 additional gas stations every year. The goals for the past 2 years were both successfully fulfilled. That year, the division fulfilled their annual target in the first 5 months. Such a leader in the old days would very likely be regarded as “discontented with his lot,” but now he is hailed as an outstanding leader.

A Good Leader Must Be Open to New Ideas and Constantly Try to Improve Himself. This quality should not be viewed as a new one, because one of the things that Confucius repeatedly asked his disciples to do was to “take great pains in learning.” However, in the past several decades, only learning Marxism and Mao Zedong thought was encouraged. Learning a trade was discouraged. Now all managers have to learn managerial skills because, “The new structure of the economy forces you to have a brain of your own. You have to manage the followers, not just to make them do what your leaders told them to do.” Almost all the leaders whom the participants talked about have obtained an MBA degree while working full-time. A female manager said her boss had a “really broad interest” and he reads “all sorts of things” and “gets his ideas from different sources.” A male manager from the steel complex said his superior had gone to Australia for 6 months to learn English in order to “read and appreciate Western management ideas better.”

Several interviewees from the same corporation said their general manager kept a very close relationship with his friends working in different companies from whom he found out what his competitors were up to. “Nothing can beat such guanxi when it comes to information,” they said. The general manager also requires employees in the company to work 5 days and studying 1 day every week (“5+1” schedule). All middle-level managers in the corporation are rotated every 6 months to receive systematic training in management, thus all the middle managers “who are still ‘lambs’ now can all be turned into ‘lions’ so they could be better leaders.”

A Good Leader Must Initiate Change and Be Determined to Carry Out the Change. As was reflected in the media analyses (Fu & Tsui, 2003), change orientation was also said to be one of the most important leadership qualities. According to the participants, nobody now trusts leaders who have “the head of a tiger, but the tail of a snake” (people who make lots of empty promises without carrying through them). A female manager, who happened to be a personal friend of a CEO and knew how much pressure he went through for each of his new ideas, said “People give him a lot of respect and admiration after he succeeds. But most of them shy away when he needed the support and understanding most.” Therefore, good leaders not only have the ideas to change, but should also be very determined to carry out their ideas.

A Good Leader Must be Humane. As reflected in GLOBE societal value survey and media analyses, which found being humane an important leadership quality (Fu & Tsui, 2003), the quality of being humane was also viewed as important by the interviewees. In fact, good business leaders are described as “Confucius businessman,” because the word Confucius indicates benevolence or kindness, but the image of a businessman used to be regarded as bad, someone who was most concerned with money and had no sense of renqing, thus being a “Confucius businessman” means to be humane while being profit oriented.

In one company, there is a policy that forbids coaches from accepting any forms of bribes in the company's driving school. Once, one of the coaches accepted a packet of cigarettes, thinking that was not a big deal. But he was fired according to the rule. A few weeks later, the person came back to the company, asking his former employer to let him come back because he could not find a job anywhere else that could pay him as much. The company did not take him back because that would be against the rule. However, they called around and introduced him to another company. “We wanted to be humane to him because we know he needed the money he had been making but we also did not want to violate the rules,” an interviewee said, adding: “We are Chinese. Renqing is a big thing to us.”

Other interviewees offered more examples. One said that his boss would go to the hospital if he heard of someone in the company being hospitalized if he could find the time, or send someone else to go on his behalf if he could not find the time: “Even when family members are sick or have an accident, he would ask people in his office to show concerns and to help in ways the company can.” Another respondent said that his boss “would make sure that he call[ed] on their families when some employees go on business trips just to check and see if everything is OK and offer them help if needed.” These behaviors were consistent with Confucius virtue of renqing (benevolence, righteousness). One of Confucius's favorite sayings was: “The character of a ruler is like wind and that of the people is like grass. In whatever direction the wind blows, the grass always bends” (Confucius, 12:19).

A Good Leader Knows What Works for the Chinese While Learning From the West. Since the reform, the Chinese Communist Party, which had been emphasizing ideological construction till the reform, has been urging the whole country to learn Western managerial philosophies in order to speed up its modernization (Fu & Tsui, 2003). Textbooks published by Harvard Business School, management cases, and translated books on successful Western businesspeople are everywhere. However, all our interviewees pointed out that “what works for the Americans or the Germans may not work as well or may not work at all, for the Chinese.” China has a unique history and culture; to succeed, “China's reforms must have Chinese features,” they said. They gave many examples to explain what they meant by “Chinese features.”

One interviewee said most of the employees in his company were researchers and used to be very self-centered and opinionated. All of them were good at what they were doing, but they were not very good collaborators. To get them to cooperate with each other, his boss visited those people one by one after work and had long talks with them in their homes. He also invited them to have dinner together on a weekly basis to give them the opportunity to get to know each other. “These ways may not be written anywhere in Western management books, but they surely worked with this group of people,” he said.

“My boss knows how to touch people's hearts,” he said. “Westerners use job descriptions to tell workers what they are expected to do and reward people accordingly, but those kinds of things don't work very well here.” He gave an example to illustrate that. One of the senior researchers was living in a one-bedroom apartment because his research projects failed to get any of the prizes, which were necessary to get bigger living spaces according to the company policy. However, his projects were of great value. When the company built another apartment building, the manager gave the senior researcher a three-bedroom apartment. But the researcher's wife did not want to move because she did not like the location. He went to the researcher's home to talk to the wife in person and also talked to her several times on the phone, explaining to her why he thought they should take the bigger apartment. Finally, the couple accepted it and the researcher, even though 70 years old now, is still producing new product designs.

Another interviewee said: “Chinese people ‘jiang renqing’ (value renqing),” which implies reciprocity; “if you touch their heart, they will for sure devote themselves to you.” Still another participant said: “Rules and policies can make people work hard, but can never win their hearts.”

Summary. The interview results show clear connections between the profile of Chinese society generated from the GLOBE cultural survey and the desired leadership attributes and behaviors. For example, the high degree of uncertainty avoidance, as well as the desire for the society to encourage more assertive behaviors can be seen in the emphasis on the balance between conservatism and aggressiveness. The results also show that whereas the influence of the traditional values, which consist of class system (social hierarchical order), obedience, doctrine of the mean, and renqing, have been the most deep-rooted, the influences of Communist ideologies, which advocate values such as action orientation, confidence, and determination, and Western management philosophies, which promote aggressiveness, ambitiousness, and competency, are also obvious (Fu & Tsui, 2003).

The connections between the societal value survey results and the findings from the qualitative data are further supported by the quantitative results from the GLOBE leadership survey, which are presented in the following section.

Results of GLOBE Leadership Survey

The GLOBE leadership questionnaire survey was conducted along with the societal value survey. The same group of respondents completed the survey. We compared the responses by managers from the two industries, using independent sample t tests. Because there were no significant differences, we combined the two groups of answers in our analyses. The results of the survey are presented in Table 24.2. The table shows the average score by the Chinese managers on each of the 21 first-order and each of the 6 second-order (bold letters in Table 24.2) leadership dimensions (Dorfman, Hanges, & Brodbeck, 2004; for definitions, see also the introductory and concluding chapters in this volume), as well as the ranks of those scores among the 61 participating countries. It also shows the highest and the lowest country scores on each of the scales.

The GLOBE leadership dimensions are summary indexes of the characteristics, skills, and abilities (cf. Dorfman et al., 2004, p. 675) that are perceived to inhibit outstanding leadership (greatly = 7, somewhat = 6, slightly = 5), have no impact (4), or contribute to outstanding leadership (slightly = 5, somewhat = 6, greatly = 7).

On one hand, the table shows that compared to managers in other countries, Chinese managers are less likely to perceive Face Saving (3.97, ranked 4th) to have a negative impact on a person being an outstanding leader than managers in most of the other countries. Similarly, Nonparticipative leadership (3.24) is perceived to only slightly inhibit a person from being an outstanding leader (Rank 8). These relatively more positive views about face-saving and non-participative attributes of leaders could be due to the fact that Chinese are discouraged to take extreme views on any matter (e.g., none of the Chinese scores on the 21 first-order scales is below 2 or above 6 on the scale from 1 to 7). However, as was described earlier about societal culture dimensions, there was no indication of response bias to result in distorted values for China.

On the other hand, Chinese managers seem to place particular positive emphasis on Humane Orientation (5.40, Rank 6), which corresponds with the societal cultural emphasis on personal dignity (mianzi).

The highest scores within China were on subscales such as Integrity (5.98), Inspirational (5.92), Administratively Competent (5.88), and Visionary (5.85). These findings suggest that, despite comparatively low scores (the second-order dimension of Charismatic Leadership ranks 54), among the 61 GLOBE countries, the universally endorsed charismatic value-based leadership (cf. Dorfman et al., 2004) is also relatively strongly espoused within the Chinese sample, when compared to the scores of the other leadership dimensions for China. This is consistent with the results of a recently completed media analyses (Fu & Tsui, 2003).

TABLE 24.2
Chinese Results of GLOBE Leadership Survey

Leadership Dimensions	Mean	Rank	Highest Score	Lowest Score
Self-Protective Leadership	3.80	14	4.62	2.55
Self-Centered	2.22	23	6.20	1.55
Status Conscious	4.47	25	5.93	3.00
Conflict Inducer	4.40	14	5.01	3.09
Face Saver	3.97	4	4.63	2.05
Procedural	3.94	28	5.12	2.82
Humane Leadership	5.19	16	5.75	3.82
Humane	5.40	6	5.68	2.23
Modesty	5.03	32	5.86	4.14
Autonomous Leadership	4.07	18	4.63	2.27
Participative Leadership	5.04	44	6.09	4.50
Autocratic (reverse scored)	2.66	27	3.86	1.89
Nonparticipative (reverse scored)	3.24	8	3.61	1.86
Team-Oriented Leadership	5.57	51	6.21	4.74
Team Integrator	5.71	14	6.09	4.42
Collaborative Team Oriented	5.36	57	6.43	4.10
Administrative Competent	5.88	26	6.42	4.53
Diplomatic	5.05	58	6.05	4.49
Malevolent (reverse scored)	2.04	12	2.67	1.33
Charismatic Leadership	5.56	54	6.46	4.51
Performance Orientation	5.64	56	6.64	4.51
Visionary	5.85	48	6.50	4.62
Inspirational	5.92	45	6.63	5.04
Integrity	5.98	43	6.79	4.72
Self-Sacrificial	4.70	51	5.99	3.98
Decisive	5.29	57	6.37	3.62

The other dimension that received relatively high scores within China was Team-Oriented leadership, the subscales of which include Team Integrator (5.71), Administratively Competent (5.88), and Collaborative Team Orientation (5.36), indicating that Chinese managers consider various facets of team-oriented leadership (blended with administrative skills) to be important facilitators of outstanding leadership. Such findings are also consistent with the results of another recent study by Fu and associates on the top-management teams in Chinese high-tech firms (see Fu et al., 2002), which shows that there is a tendency for high-tech firms to rely on a team of leaders rather than a single leader. Furthermore, it seems that the dual identity (see later) of many business leaders, who tend to be also members of the Communist Party, left its trace in relatively high scores for Administrative Competency.

The subscales that received the lowest scores included Autocratic (2.66, Rank 27), Self-Centered (2.22, Rank 23), and Malevolent (2.04, Rank 12), showing that Chinese managers regard these factors as clear inhibitors of outstanding leadership. The inhibiting self-protective leadership style, also universally endorsed among GLOBE countries, is obviously also not accepted by Chinese managers. However, China's comparatively high score on the second-order Self-protective leadership dimension (3.80, Rank 14), which comprises some of the aforementioned and further subscales (e.g., Status-conscious, 4.47; Conflict Inducer, 4.40; see Table 24.2), is comparatively high within the 61 GLOBE countries. Its score is near 4.00, which marks the scales’ center (no impact on outstanding leadership).

Additional Chinese Characteristics

The profile of the Chinese leadership presented by the scores on the GLOBE leadership dimensions is quite consistent with the findings of other empirical research. In fact, due to the small N for the study, the first author used the GLOBE instrument and collected data from more than 400 middle managers in the US and China, respectively, and then from another over 400 Chinese only sample in a different study. The results were all consistent with those presented here. However, there are a couple of additional features about Chinese leadership that were not evaluated in the GLOBE leadership survey and yet will help our readers better understand Chinese business leaders.

Dual Identity. This may not be a historical heritage, but this is definitely an emic (i.e., culture-specific) Chinese feature for now: Almost all business leaders are, at the same time, Communist Party members. The leaders who participated in our focus group interviews were all Party members. Some of them held leading positions in the Party committee as well, therefore having dual identities. In fact, the most important difference between the American and the Chinese political systems may concern the political parties. In the United States, the Democratic and the Republican parties compete with each other, but in China, the only ruling party is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and all the other parties have to work collaboratively with the ruling Party.

A selective organization, the Party recruits its members on the basis of their suitability for leadership in its political life or for role models for their coworkers. One in every 22 Chinese now is a Party member, for a total membership of about 57 million in 1997 (Fu & Wu, 2000). Functioning somewhat like a board of directors for the country, the CCP defines its function as that of making all the critical decisions, which the government must then carry out. Unlike a board of directors, however, the CCP has created an organizational structure operating in parallel to that of the government bureaucracy, so that Party members oversee the work of the bureaucrats at every level (Starr, 1997): “[Communists] must be modest and prudent, restrain themselves from any presumption and any precipitation, be capable of practicing self-criticism and have the courage to correct inadequacies and errors in their work. In any case, they should not hide their errors, take all the credit for themselves and lay all the blame on others” (Mao, cited in Bouc, 1977, p. 199). Being Communist Party members, organizational leaders all have to abide by rules stipulated by the Party and all have to contribute to the construction of the Party ideology. They have to meet at least once a week as a Party committee to reflect on what happened during the week and to study the works of Party leaders or documents issued by the Central Committee. As Party members, they are also expected to be role models for their followers, working hard and serving the people whole-heartedly. Those who hold both Party leadership and managerial positions are expected to lead in morality cultivation.

Paternalism. Paternalistic is another feature of the Chinese leaders. Confucius extended the family structure to organizations and made government leaders “heads of families.” As a result, some researchers explicitly call Asian leadership “headship” to distinguish it from Western leadership (e.g., Holloman, 1986). Traditionally, in Chinese contexts, a person was born into a headship position and was thereby expected to display leadership by virtue of that background and position: This is the reverse of the situation in the West where people show leadership capabilities or qualities before becoming a leader. Although leaders are no longer explicitly “heads of families,” expectations for fatherly roles are still visible; therefore it is suggested that leadership in China is still somewhat paternalistic. This leadership concept is well in line with the Chinese societal cultural perceptions and values of low Gender Egalitarianism as was discussed previously.

Weber (1951) expressed the foundation for the paternalistic feature when he characterized the form of domination prevalent in the Chinese context as patrimonial, and linked it to the patriarchal traditions whereby absolute power is invested in the male head of the household. Bond and Hwang (1986) argued that Chinese leadership is modeled on this father's role as household head, and Bond (1991) explicitly stated that “The effective model for leadership systems like the Chinese is thus the wise and loving father” (p. 453). In fact, the whole country was considered as a huge family with the late Chairman Mao being the “father.” Organizations were also viewed as families; the top leader of an organization was regarded as the head of the family. Therefore, it was only natural that members in the organization expect themselves to be taken care of once they joined the organization.

This feature is still obvious in today's media, even though not as strong as it used to be. You can still read descriptions such as so-and-so cares for the young workers “like his own children,” or a leader sacrifices his “small family's interests for the bigger family” (the organization). The purpose of these various formulations is also to make employees feel that the organization they work for is like a big family for them. For example, a factory leader in Shanghai heard that young employees in his factory were having difficulties finding lovers. He found another factory in town whose majority workforce were female and organized parties for the workers in the two factories and also purposely let his young employees who were still single work day shifts only so “they can go out dating” in the evening.

Integration, Limitations, and Future Research

If you remember the stories of the three leaders we discussed earlier, you would probably agree that despite the lapse of time, many of the qualities people look for in good leaders in China now remain surprisingly unchanged from earlier times. Qualities such as hard-working, knowledgeable, and capable all conform to the expected behaviors under Confucianism and are still well respected. Most of the leaders’ qualities mentioned by the participants, such as humane, aggressive, change-oriented, and eager to learn, are similar to those covered in the media (Fu & Tsui, 2003).

Qualities such as visionary, aggressive, anxious to learn, and humane, which were unanimously pointed out as the most important in the interviews, are also most frequently mentioned attributes in the printed media (Fu & Tsui, 2003). But in addition to those, a few other characteristics such as problem solving, devoted, and hard-working, which were also among the frequently mentioned in stories on leaders in the printed media, were not mentioned by the interviewees.

The interviewees shared most of the media opinions, but differed on a few. Where they could not agree with each other actually reflects the differences caused by emphases on different values. For example, managers from one large corporation, who were mostly in their late 40s and early 50s, all thought that management should be accomplished by a group of people, because one individual person could not have all the favorable qualities. However, one participant explicitly pointed out that leadership should be individualized. She was a few years younger than most of the participants and received her MBA in the United States. She argued that group leadership was irresponsible, because when a group made a decision, individuals tended to just go along with it rather than voice their real opinions.

Another group of participants pointed out that many of the traditional values, such as hard-working and setting up role models, were still necessary even though they alone no longer made leaders effective. However, the female participant argued that those were not important qualities and did not, and should not, affect the effectiveness of a leader. It was hard to judge whose view is more representative. More research is necessary to qualitatively examine whether age serves as an intervening factor on choice of leadership styles.

The inability to reach any conclusion due to limited sample size was an obvious limitation of our study. Due to this limitation, there were several other unresolved differences. For example, in the current printed media, one can still read descriptions of leaders such as “on his calendar, there are no holidays or weekends”; “He stayed with his workers, feeling guilty that he could not be with his dying mother”; or “He stayed in cheap hotels, eating instant noodles.” However, most participants in our focus group interviews explicitly pointed out that “qualities such as frugality, not caring for home” were not necessarily good qualities; at least they were not the most important ones to make good leaders. This shows that the Chinese government is still trying to use those traditional values to influence its leaders, but the leaders seem to be more interested in keeping up with the fast-growing trend of using the West as the model and trying to keep up with the rest of the world. In fact, due to the small N for the study, for the first author used the GLOBE instrument and collected data from over 400 middle managers in US and China respectively, and then from another over 400 Chinese only sample in a different study.

6.  CONCLUSIONS

“Deep cultural undercurrents structure life in subtle but highly consistent ways that are not consciously formulated. Like the invisible jet streams in the skies that determine the course of a storm, these currents shape our lives; yet their influence is only beginning to be identified” (Hall, 1981, p. 12). It is interesting to notice that the analogy Hall made in the preceding quote is very similar to the one American missionary Arthur Smith gave over a century before in his book on Chinese characteristics: “The Confucian Classics are the chart by which the rulers of China have endeavored to navigate the ship of state.” Confucianism has affected the Chinese people for thousands of years. In fact, Confucianism, as a system of thought, is “among the most remarkable intellectual achievements of the race” (Smith, 1894, p. 287). It has navigated the Chinese craft into waters they have sailed and is still steering the ship of state. Indeed, as Dr. Williams (quoted by Smith) said: “It would be hard to overestimate the influence of Confucius in his ideal princely scholar, and the power for good over his race which this conception has ever since exerted” (p. 287).

Chinese society is going through unprecedented changes. Though traditional values are still highly respected, and constantly pull back Chinese organizational leaders and urge them to conform to the traditional values, their internal desires to become competitive and the external pressure to do so are all pushing them toward modern Western ideologies, encouraging them to challenge the norms. In its endeavor to modernize itself, China has absorbed much of the Western influences. However, the influence of Confucianism still exists. The doctrine that the virtuous and the able should be the rulers, and that their rule must be based on virtue, the comprehensive philosophy of the five relations of men to each other, and the doctrine that no one should do to another what he would not have done to himself are still deeply embedded in the Chinese thought. At the same time, the influence of communist ideologies and the rising influence of Western philosophies are also very prominent.

It is true that there are many problems in China: aging, corruption, company downsizing, pollution, poor efficiency, to name just a few. However, China is also full of hope. Despite the Asian financial crisis and the SARS epidemic, China's economy has been growing steadily. In the past 20 years, its gross domestic product (GDP) has increased more than 10-fold (Ahlstrom, Bruton, & Lui, 2000), and its economic growth has been sustained at 8% every year according to the data released by International Monetary Fund (IMF). “Despite the dim economic report, China looks robust compared to the shrinking economies of many Asian countries, economists said.” (AFP, 1998).

Even though made over three decades ago, Zhou Enlai's prediction still applies: “I can predict China's future is bright and colorful; a few clouds will in the end be driven away by thunder and lightning; and the raindrops under the bright sunshine will reflect our fatherland in more beautiful colors. What follows will be the discharging beauty of competing flowers by the hundreds, and it will be the springtime for all mankind. Let this prediction be my last parting words” (Chang, 1984, p. 167). Epstein, an American journalist who went to China in the 1920s and later became a Chinese citizen, wrote:

The bright future of China makes it necessary and useful to study and understand Chinese culture and its influence on its business leaders. We tried to present some basic information in the previous pages and hope it will help our readers understand the influence of cultural values on Chinese business leaders. But we know we have only barely touched those “cultural undercurrents.” Maybe together we can continue the exploration of the cultural undercurrents that shape the thinking and behavior of the people in this ancient land, and gain a good understanding of the traditional values that have lasted for thousands of years. Such an understanding will be beneficial to us all in our endeavor to make this world a better place to live in.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to acknowledge the contributions made by Fudan doctoral student Zhou Jian and other project team members in the collection and analyses of the data. We would also like to thank the comments from our anonymous reviewers, which have made the chapter more informative and readable.

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¹The detailed information on the sample is missing because the demographic data of the project was lost in the mailing process.