China's manufacturers talk a lot about the "craftsman spirit" — the patience, precision and pride that turn a worker into a master. Many still pass it on the old way, through a shifu and an apprentice. A new study asked which kind of shifu does it best.
Huan-Huan Zhang and a co-author surveyed 343 master-apprentice pairs in China's manufacturing sector, an industry in the middle of transformation and upgrading. They examined two sides of the masters' leadership: benevolence, meaning genuine care for the apprentice, and authority, meaning control and demands for obedience. Using response surface analysis, they mapped how different mixes of the two related to the apprentices' craftsman spirit.
Three findings emerged. When benevolence and authority were aligned, a high level of both brought no significant advantage over a low level of both. When they were out of balance, direction mattered: high benevolence with low authority fostered craftsman spirit more effectively than the reverse. And loyalty carried the effect — apprentices who felt cared for committed to their master and to the craft.
The authors recommend that manufacturers select and train masters for this kind of balanced leadership and set up institutional master-apprentice pairing, with deliberate attention to the emotional side of the relationship.
A meta-analysis of 152 studies across fourteen countries found a similar pattern for paternalistic leadership as a whole. Benevolence was consistently linked to better outcomes, and strong control to worse ones.
Sources
Zhang, H.-H., & Li. (2026). Exploring the connection between authoritarian-benevolent leadership and craftsman spirit: The mediating role of loyalty. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1456088
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
