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Globalization gives rise to the need to understand leadership across different countries and cultures, which points to an increased emphasis on indigenous leadership research. Indigenous leadership research relies on local language and local subjects to explore local perspectives of leadership based on historical, societal, and cultural factors (Zhang et al. , 2012; McElhatton and Jackson, 2012). The influence of historical, societal, and cultural factors on leadership practices highlights the challenges of transferring leadership theories and practices across variable contexts (Rousseau and Fried, 2001; Zhang et al. , 2012). Leadership research has been dominated by western perspectives in western contexts (Yukl, 2010) and much more research is needed in eastern cultures. Specifically, Asian perspectives of leadership are essential to explore given the rise in economic reform and stature of countries such as China. Research on Chinese leadership is still considered a relatively emerging area of interest especially when compared to western leadership research (Zhao and Jiang, 2009; Leung, 2012). It was pointed out that even Chinese researchers "pay surprisingly little attention to the impact of the Chinese context on the leadership phenomena" (Cheng et al. , 2009, p. 94). Because of the strong influence of western theory building and development, Chinese scholars try to duplicate the research findings from the west in the eastern regions without paying attention to the context shaped by their values and history. Cheng et al. (2009) indicated that institutional pressures to publish and the lack of experience in indigenous research have shifted the focus away from truly studying Chinese leadership theories and issues by Chinese scholars. Zhang et al. (2012) call for more indigenous research in countries such as China and suggest "unique leadership phenomena such as those embedded in history, tradition, and culture cannot be fully explained by Western theories [...] there is a clear need to resolve this asymmetry in the creation of leadership knowledge" (p. 1065).
In this paper, we conduct indigenous leadership research by relying on local managers from two regions in mainland China for the purposes of capturing their ideal and Confucian perspectives of leadership. In doing so, we rely on measures developed by Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE) that were translated into the local language. The primary aim of this study is to...