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Paternalistic leadership in Chinese

organizations: research progress and

future research directions

jiing-lih farh, jian liang, li-fang

chou, and bor-shiuan cheng

P

ATERNALISTIC LEADERSHIP(PL) is an indigenous Chinese

leadership style that is rooted in China’s patriarchal tradition

and has been found to be prevalent in overseas Chinese family

businesses. Farh and Cheng ( 2000 ) proposed a model of PL that has

three components: authoritarianism, benevolence, and moral leader-

ship. Since then, a series of empirical studies have been conducted by

Cheng and his colleagues to examine the validity of Farh and Cheng’s

PL model using a variety of samples from Taiwan and mainland

China. In this chapter, we review this body of research and identify

promising areas for future research.

Introduction

In the second half of the twentieth century, entrepreneurship among

overseas Chinese exploded not only in Chinese-dominated commu-

nities such as Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, but also in South-

east Asian countries, such as Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and the

Philippines, where the Chinese are in the minority (Weidenbaum,

1996 ). Scholars who were intrigued by this phenomenon embarked

on a series of studies of the practices of overseas Chinese businesses.

They discovered a distinct management/leadership style called pater-

nalism, widely practiced among the owners/managers of overseas

Chinese family businesses (e.g. Cheng,1995c; Redding, 1990 ; Silin,

1976 ; Westwood, 1997 ). Paternalism, which is rooted in the tradi-

tional Chinese family structure, has crossed the boundary of families

and generalized to the workplace. Like the father in a Chinese

family, the superior in a company is expected to provide guidance,

protection, nurture, and care to the subordinate; like a dutiful

son, the subordinate, in return, is normally required to be loyal and

deferent to the superior (Aycan, 2006 ). Paternalism has become a salient

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