The impacts of Chinese firm ownership and manager leadership on subordinate work values

Abstract

As the mechanism for sustaining new technologies, creation of innovative culture is imperative in technical workplaces. Power-distance-oriented leadership is thought ineffective in fostering subordinates innovative values. This study contributes to organisational learning literature by examining whether participative leadership plays a mediating role to adjust the undesired impact in innovative culture acculturation. The sample comes from employees in four types of firms differing in ownership across two Chinese business clusters to represent level of organisational Westernisation. The findings reveal supports for the hypothesised relationships between firm ownership and subordinate work values accounted for this Westernisation connection: the state-owned and foreign-controlled businesses appear to hold the old and the new values on the two extremes separately; the privately owned fall somewhere in between. Additional mediation analysis suggests that an adjustment of manager's leadership from power-distance to participative can help reduce the negative impacts to foster subordinates innovative values, regardless of the old.