Leadership and Management in China: Philosophies, Theories, and Practices

483 employees rating some 250 managers in a private conglomerate.
Bothgroupsofrespondentscompletedthe PLSontheirdirectsupervisors
and gave their attitudinal responses to their leaders (i.e. satisfaction
with the leader and trust in the leader). The two samples, one drawn
from a private conglomerate and one from public primary schools,
provide a good opportunity to see the actual distribution of the eight
types of PL leader in two different organizational contexts.
Since the PLS employs a six-point Likert scale for rating leadership
behavior (1¼strongly disagree; 2¼disagree; 3¼slightly disagree;
4 ¼slightly agree; 5¼agree; 6¼strongly agree), we use the mid-point
of the absolute scale (3.5) as the cutoff to determine whether a leader
was high or low on each PL dimension. Admittedly, this dichotomization

Table 6.1.Distributions of ideal leader choices and actual leaders across
the eight types of paternalistic leader.

Paternalistic
leader type

Ideal leader

choice

Distribution of actual leaders

School

principals

Managers

in a private

conglomerate

Frequency % Frequency % Frequency %

1 Authentic (ABC) 69 26.0 32 6.4 87 18.0
2 Godfather (ABc) 2 0.8 1 0.2 6 1.2
3 Disciplinarian
(AbC)

15 5.7 28 6.0 40 8.3

4 Dictatorial (Abc) 2 0.8 20 3.4 27 6.0
5 Selfless
benefactor (aBC)

128 48.3 325 64.9 237 49.1

6 Indulgent (aBc) 1 0.4 29 5.8 4 0.8
7 Ideological (abC) 48 18.1 50 10.0 63 13.0
8 Laissez-faire(abc) 0 0.0 16 3.2 19 3.9
Total 265 100 501 100 483 100

Note:
Paternalistic leader types are coded: A¼high authoritarian; a¼low authoritarian;
B¼high benevolence; b¼low benevolence; C¼high moral character; c¼low moral
character.
Sources:Sample for ideal leader choice distribution from Niu ( 2006 ); samples for
actual leader distribution from Cheng, Chou, and Farh ( 2000 ).

188 Jiing-lih Farhet al.