The Effect of Leadership on the Performance of Chinese Manufacturing Companies: The Mediated Effects of Value Innovation

The aim of this paper is to find out the effects of leadership, mediated by value innovation on the business financial performance of the manufacturing SMEs in China. Second, to examine what kind of links there are among leadership, value innovation and financial performance of Chinese manufacturing firms are explored. Last but not least, this paper will investigate Chinese manufacturing companies, which have survived and grown. To discuss what kind of key factors they have and how they adopt these strategies in order to achieve value innovation for their corporate growth in emerging markets, the result of this study is that there is a positive relationship between leadership value innovation, and financial performance of companies. Meanwhile, results illustrated that product innovation mediated the relationship of leadership with financial performance, but business model innovation has no mediating role on the relationship of leadership with financial performance.