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Introduction
Context is crucial in understanding leadership phenomena. The context of leadership is the milieu – the physical and social environment – in which leadership is observed (Liden and Antonakis, 2009). All leadership theories are developed in specific contexts (Johns, 2006; Rousseau and Fried, 2001). Lewin (1947) first introduced the concept of context into organizational research by pointing out that behavior cannot be fully understood without consideration of the situation in which persons are embedded (Liden and Antonakis, 2009). Scholars used to consider the context within the organization and simplify it as a moderator variable. Recently, researchers have been expanding the scope of context into a multi-level phenomenon. In particular, it has been demonstrated that leadership phenomena are largely influenced by the national context. As most leadership theories were developed in the Western context, leadership phenomena in the Chinese context have thus far been largely overlooked (Yukl, 2010; Zhang et al., 2012). Considering the uniqueness of the Chinese cultures in which leaders are embedded, it should be interesting to investigate the unique leadership behaviors in the Chinese context.
Chinese organizational leaders do behave in a unique way. For example, as the founder of Haier Group (a well-known household appliance enterprise in China), Zhang Ruimin always uses guanxi and follows the tacit rules that prevail in China (Zhang et al., 2012) to access resources from the government, even though the firm has decided to establish its own market mechanisms. His motto –“Think on principle, act flexibly” – indicates that there might be deviations between what leaders think and what they do. It is common for what Chinese organizational leaders want to do to be different from what they actually do; sometimes what they say is opposite to what they do.
Why do Chinese leaders behave differently from Western leaders? We argue that the Chinese social governance mechanism is one of the main causes. Social governance influences leadership behaviors because it is used to allocate the crucial resources leaders want to acquire for the development of their organizations. China’s 30 years of transformation from a planned economy to a market economy led to changes in its social governance structure. China’s social governance is more complex than that of Western nations because of the mix of...