In Taiwan and in many Chinese family businesses, a classic leadership style has a name: paternalistic leadership. It combines three things: firm authority, fatherly kindness and personal integrity. Researchers have long wondered which of the three makes the difference.

Xiao-Ping Chen and her colleagues studied 601 supervisor-employee pairs in 27 companies of a Taiwanese conglomerate. Their study appeared in the Journal of Management.

The pattern was clear. Kindness and integrity both went with better performance, in the daily job and in the extra effort people put in beyond it. Strict control went with weaker performance.

The link ran through trust of the heart, which researchers call affective trust: the feeling that the boss is on your side. Kind and honest leaders enjoyed more of it, and in the statistical analysis this trust carried the connection to performance. For strict control, trust did not explain the link. The study is based on survey data, so it shows strong associations rather than proof of cause and effect.

A later meta-analysis that combined 152 studies with more than 68,000 people in fourteen countries found the same pattern on a larger scale. Even where this leadership style is common and accepted, kindness went with stronger performance and more positive attitudes at work, and strict control with weaker results.

Read the study

Sources

Chen, X.-P., Eberly, M. B., Chiang, T.-J., Farh, J.-L., & Cheng, B.-S. (2014). Affective trust in Chinese leaders: Linking paternalistic leadership to employee performance. Journal of Management, 40(3), 796–819. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206311410604

Hiller, N. J., Sin, H.-P., Ponnapalli, A. R., & Ozgen, S. (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.