Demographic and Business Related Effects on Leadership Styles of Chinese and German Managers

AbstractThis article sheds light on the effects of demographic and business related factors on leadership behaviour by surveying 203 German managers and 778 Chinese business ANOVA analysis indicates that Chinese managers' leadership behavior is strongly affected by the factors age, the educational level, the position in the company, job tenure and the nature of business sectors. The latter two businesses related factors also execute substantial effects on German managers' leadership styles. Further distinctions evolve; the factor company location has impacts on Chinese managers' but not on German managers' values. This indicates a distinctive Chinese intracultural variety which may have arisen from a much larger country size compared to Germany.Keywords: Demographic and business related factors, cultural embeddedness, leadership styles, cross-cultural study, Chinese and German managers.IntroductionThis article covers culture and leadership and has two main concerns. The first principal research purpose is to empirically investigate the impacts of German managers' cultural embeddedness on leadership styles based on primary data collection. The second major research purpose is a cross-cultural comparison of differences and similarities between German and Chinese managers based on the interpretation of primary data and on secondary data's findings.The reference for comparison is Zhu's50 dissertation Cultural influences on leadership styles - an empirical study on 778 pieces of questionnaires of contemporary Chinese business leaders. This prior research investigated the effects of culture on values and leadership through surveying Chinese managers. Hence, the present study extends Zhu's50 work as it measures potential impacts on leadership surveying 203 German managers and thus, it allows integrating a cross-cultural perspective.For this article and in consistency with Zhu50, the broad culture concept is specified as cultural embeddedness which implies an eight-dimensional construct containing demographical and business related factors. Specifically, the effects of age, gender, educational level, position held in the company, job tenure, company scale, the nature of business sectors and the company location were examined. The leadership concept is ensuring comparability with Zhu50 - condensed to three theoretically and practically established leadership styles. These are namely the authoritarian (or autocratic), the democratic (or participative) and the laissez-faire (or free reign) leadership style.According to the above delineated research issue, two research questions emerge:Research question 1: Will any of the eight dimensions of cultural embeddedness be significantly correlated with any of the three leadership styles for German managers?Research question 2: What will be the differences and similarities comparing this empirical study's results with Zhu's50 findings between the impacts on German and Chinese managers?The study contributes to theory in four ways. First, it is important for future research on culture in general and on cross-cultural comparisons in particular because further studies find a paved road for focusing on certain dimensions of cultural embeddedness and leaving aside other cultural aspects, as this empirical study intends to identify those cultural factors accounting for most significant impacts on leadership styles. Second, this research has high practical relevance for multinational enterprises as they pool labor forces from various cultures and thus have to cope with the impacts of distinct characteristics of cultural embeddedness. Third, this paper is significant for leadership research as it will show that the reliable and established three dimensional approach of Lewin is still applicable and not obsolete in modem research even though many other distinguished approaches have emerged over time. Apart, this study may falsify the fiction of an entirely free choice of leadership style for managers because partly unchangeable manifestations of cultural embeddedness at least co-decide the leadership style selection. …