In Taiwan and across Chinese family businesses, a classic leadership style has a name: paternalistic leadership. It combines three elements — strong authority, fatherly benevolence and personal moral integrity. Researchers have long asked which of the three actually does the work.
Xiao-Ping Chen and colleagues studied 601 supervisor-subordinate pairs in 27 companies of a Taiwanese conglomerate. Their study, published in the Journal of Management, draws on two core Confucian values: hierarchy and relationalism.
The three elements split cleanly. Benevolence and morality were both linked to better performance — in the core job and in the extra effort beyond it. Authoritarianism was linked to worse performance.
The mechanism was affective trust, the emotional confidence that the leader has your back. It carried the effect of benevolent and moral leadership on performance. For authoritarian leadership, it played no such role.
A later meta-analysis of 152 studies with more than 68,000 people in fourteen countries confirmed the pattern on a larger scale. Even in societies where paternalistic leadership is common and accepted, strong control was consistently linked to weaker performance and attitudes, while benevolence was consistently linked to stronger ones.
Sources
Chen, X.-P., et al. (2014). Affective trust in Chinese leaders: Linking paternalistic leadership to employee in-role and extra-role performance. Journal of Management. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311410604
Hiller, N. J., et al. (2019). Benevolence and authority as WEIRDly unfamiliar: A multi-language meta-analysis of paternalistic leadership behaviors from 152 studies. The Leadership Quarterly. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.11.003
Further reading
Farh, J.-L., & Cheng, B.-S. (2000). A cultural analysis of paternalistic leadership in Chinese organizations. In J. T. Li et al. (Eds.), Management and organizations in the Chinese context. Palgrave Macmillan.
