Elsevier

The Leadership Quarterly

Volume 23, Issue 6, December 2012, Pages 1063-1079
The Leadership Quarterly

Understanding indigenous leadership research: Explication and Chinese examples

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2012.10.009Get rights and content

Abstract

Integrating the constructivist and positivist research traditions, we propose a three-step methodological framework and use a study of Chinese indigenous leadership practices as an example to illustrate how to utilize the framework to study indigenous leadership practices. We argue that indigenous leadership research is an ideal way to examine and interpret leadership practices in a specific social context because not all leadership practices are captured in dominant Western perspectives that utilize Western-built instruments, which often fail to account for perspectives and practices of leadership in non-Western contexts. Finally, we discuss implications of the proposed methodology on leadership research and offer suggestions on how to deal with challenges when conducting indigenous leadership research in various cultures.

Introduction

As the business world becomes increasingly globalized, the need to understand leadership across the world is also becoming more and more urgent, making indigenous research increasingly important and necessary (Gopinath, 1998, Kempster and Parry, 2011, Tsui, 2004, Tsui, 2009). Using local language, local subjects, and local perspectives (Li et al., 2012, Tsui, 2004), indigenous leadership research primarily examines the impact of local contextual factors, including historical, societal, and cultural, on leadership outcomes in a particular region or country. Researchers taking this approach need to speak the local language and understand the local culture to analyze and interpret emergent and dynamic local meanings and concepts of leadership in a unique social context. Such an approach goes beyond traditional contextualizing and cross-cultural perspectives (Gopinath, 1998).

Despite a century-long history, almost all leadership studies so far have been conducted in the West, and nearly all leadership theories have been developed based on the Western context1 (Yukl, 2010), making them very limited in their applicability to different economies and cultures (Britto, 1973, Gonzalez and McMillan, 1961, Hofstede, 1993, Rosenzweig, 1994, Rousseau and Fried, 2001, Smith et al., 1989). This limitation makes leadership phenomena outside the Western context difficult to understand. This paper addresses this issue and contributes to the leadership literature in three ways: first, it explains the uniqueness of indigenous leadership research and the rationale for conducting such research by pointing out how this type of study differs from studies that simply include situational variables or examine the effect of culture as a moderating variable and the methodological issues involved; second, it proposes a three-step methodological framework for researchers who want to conduct indigenous leadership research; and, finally, by using an example to illustrate how to use the three-step model, it demonstrates how to combine quantitative and qualitative methods that originated from traditional positivist and constructionist views, thus offering new inspirations on how to promote leadership research in non-Western societies.

There are many reasons why leadership scholars should take the indigenous approach when studying local leadership phenomena. We discuss these reasons based on practical, methodological and theoretical perspectives.

Practically, if we consider leadership phenomena around the world as an ongoing interpretation of meaning produced by social actors (Suddaby, 2006) and if we want to understand leadership in different social contexts and develop context-specific leadership theories (Leung, 2012), indigenous research is no longer an option, but a requirement, because “local leadership phenomena” are viewed as an ongoing interpretation of meaning produced by individuals engaged in the local leadership process. In this context, most of the extant leadership theories developed by American scholars in the US can be viewed as American indigenous leadership theories, which seek to explain unique leadership phenomena in the US with local meanings and concepts. These meanings and concepts are unique to the US and distinct from those in other contexts (Riad, 2011). Further, Rousseau and Fried (2001) argued that the causal dynamic of relations in organizations might be substantially altered by the context. Therefore, theories developed in the US have limited capacity to predict and interpret leadership practices in non-American contexts, especially those that are very different from the American context (Barney and Zhang, 2009, Gonzalez and McMillan, 1961, Rousseau and Fried, 2001, Tsui, 2004).

According to Action Theory (Parsons and Shils, 1951, Parsons, 1937), individual actions (e.g., leadership behaviors) are shaped and moderated by specific social and cultural systems (Parsons & Shils, 1951), which can substantially determine the underlying causal dynamic of worker-organization relations (Rousseau & Fried, 2001). When studying leadership phenomena in a specific region or country, many factors, including historical (the development history of the country or the maturing process of the leaders in a specific context), societal (the social structure or networks of a specific context), and cultural (values, ideational systems, and behavioral models) that impact leadership outcomes should be taken into consideration. These factors may be unique in the studied context, requiring the indigenous approach to study them.

Child (2009) further proposed material, ideational, and institutional systems as contextual factors that need to be considered in organizational behavior research. Among these, material systems refer to the temporary economic and technological characteristics of the studied context, while ideational systems are the substantive values salient to the context, and institutional systems include the government, intermediate institutions, and conformity to international regulations. Obviously, material and institutional systems are temporary arrangements or circumstances of local context so that they can only influence people living within these systems. In contrast, ideational system can shape values and beliefs of people through socializing process, generating long-term or even permanent impact on people living or lived within the system for a period. These systems from different societies or nations are distinct from each other in many dimensions (Hofstede, 1980) and their influence on leadership practices gives rise to challenges in transforming leadership theories from one society or nation to another (Li and Shi, 2005, Rousseau and Fried, 2001, Smith et al., 1989).

Let's take the notion of guanxi in China as an example. Defined as a direct particularistic tie between two individuals (Tsui & Farh, 1997), guanxi plays an important role in the Chinese society. Western scholars often interpret the term using the Western concept of networks, but guanxi is much more intricate and pervasive than networks are and its effects may vary over time. In other words, guanxi is more dynamic, while networks are relatively more structured and assumed to be relatively stable once formed (Fu, Tsui, & Dess, 2006). In addition to its dynamic nature, guanxi is also much richer and more complex than networks (Yang, 2002). Not only is the inherent nature different depending on the type of people the guanxi is built on, but the quality of guanxi, “the state of the relationship at a given point in time” (Chen & Chen, 2004: 312), can also vary in the degree of closeness or strength (Tsui & Farh, 1997). Therefore, to understand how guanxi affects the dyadic leader–member relationship, we cannot simply use the Western concept of network, but rather start from a clear understanding of the nuances in the notion of guanxi and examine the subtle effect it exerts when studying leadership in China. In fact, the term guanxi has been added to the English vocabulary because of the unique connotations that are not covered by any Western concepts, and many scholars examining the impact of this unique Chinese phenomenon have explicitly pointed out that “Not understanding the differences between the Chinese notion of guanxi and the American relationship notion may lead to the mismanagement of relationships between partners or between superior and subordinates of different cultural backgrounds” (Hui & Graen, 1997: 459).

Methodologically, existing methods do not accommodate the study of indigenous leadership practices. Studying indigenous leadership requires employing novel methods and developing new context-specific leadership theories. Preliminary results from the Indigenous Leadership Research Project Team2 (Fu, 2012) offer us a good glimpse of how. The invisible driving forces behind various decisions made by leaders over the long term cannot be captured by any type of survey, no matter how comprehensive the survey is. A grounded approach has to be taken and secondary data from multiple sources have to be used for “holistic depictions of realities that cannot be reduced to a few variables” (Gephart, 2004: 455), and for comparisons and contrasts to make sense of a single event and understand the impact of various factors. However, extant leadership studies, including indigenous studies of US leaders, are mainly positivist and quantitative oriented (Bryman, 2004); the diversity of methods needs further emphasis (Munford, 2011). What is more, the philosophy of research involved in specific research methods also needs to be examined and diversified when exploring various indigenous research questions (e.g. Kempster & Parry, 2011).

Finally, theoretically, indigenous leadership studies are also critical ways by which leadership scholars can communicate and collaborate with each other to promote global leadership theories (Tsui, 2004). A compelling indigenous leadership theory should not only effectively and accurately describe the unique cultural, societal, and historical elements of a society's collective sub-consciousness (Cheng, Wang, & Huang, 2009), but it should also identify factors in social and cultural systems that shape and moderate the behaviors of individual leaders and explain how these factors influence leadership effectiveness in a particular context, thus providing global leaders implications that are relevant in a specific local context. The identification of paternalistic leadership is a good example.

Based on the previous research (Redding, 1990, Silin, 1976, Westwood, 1997), paternalistic leadership is shown to have two obvious indigenous Chinese characteristics: paternalistic authority and relational differences (Cheng, 1991). Paternalistic authority originates from the Confucian belief in social order, according to which fathers possessed absolute authority over their sons. Because of this traditional influence, organizations in China are still regarded as large families with their leaders acting as the families' heads. Accordingly, autocratic and instructive behaviors always lead to downward communications, with limited empowerment and often belittling of subordinates' contributions (Cheng, Chou, & Farh, 2000). A “differential pattern” (Fei, 1998), which refers to the different ways leaders treat insiders and outsiders, is clearly observed and results in leaders constructing intimate relationships and mutual trust with certain groups. These close relationships also lead to more opportunities for those groups to obtain support or acquire resources (Cheng, 1991). These observations are related to leadership practices but are difficult to understand without understanding their underlying reasons. Indigenously developed theories are therefore needed to explain the impact of a particular context on leadership practices and to help guide leaders to be more effective.

More than 95% of research on leadership describes North American leadership phenomena (Yukl, 2010). Our review of the 285 papers published in The Leadership Quarterly over the past five years (2007 ~ 2011) shows that 209 (73%) were conducted in the US, or were, in other words, indigenous US studies. Of the 76 that were conducted in a non-Western context, 71 (25%) used theories that were developed in the US or other Western societies. Only five (less than 2%) were genuinely indigenous studies in non-Western contexts. We analyzed those five papers and found that they used qualitative methods, such as case study (Campbell, 2008; Neal & Tansey, 2010), cultural analysis (Riad, 2011), narrative (Islam, 2009), and a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods (Yang, 2011). Three of these five indigenous studies were conducted by Western scholars in non-Western contexts.

Although some Western scholars have pointed out that cultural differences matter, they are often unfamiliar with or even misunderstand non-Western cultural concepts (Cheng et al., 2009). Moreover, scholars from non-Western nations primarily use theories that were developed and validated in the West as the basis for their research on indigenous leaders. Such studies contribute very limited knowledge and may sometimes misrepresent the leader–member relationship in the non-Western context. If applied to guiding leaders, such studies would either be totally irrelevant, or help to solve the wrong problem (Mitroff, 1998, Von Glinow and Teagarden, 2009). For example, studies using the Leader–Member exchange (LMX) theory will not fully capture the much broader exchange base in the leader and member relationship in China. The supervisor–subordinate relationship in China differs from the Western concept of LMX, which only refers to the supervisor–subordinate exchange within the work relationship and the benefits being exchanged are mainly related to work. In contrast to LMX, the supervisor–subordinate relationship in China mainly covers the non-work exchange within the vertical dyad and the benefits being exchanged can be social and material in nature. This exchange is developed through the interaction between the subordinate and the supervisor after office hours through home visits or other social functions (Chen and Tjosvold, 2006, Law et al., 2000). Unique leadership phenomena such as those embedded in history, tradition, and culture cannot be fully explained by Western theories and the subtleties that make the differences still remain largely puzzling to Western leadership scholars. Thus, there is a clear need to resolve this asymmetry in the creation of leadership knowledge (Zhao & Jiang, 2009) between Western and non-Western societies.

To address this need and promote indigenous leadership research in the non-American contexts, we propose a methodological framework as a specific way to handle key challenges in conducting high-quality indigenous leadership studies. In the following sections, we first discuss methodological issues in indigenous leadership studies and introduce the framework. Then, we offer one of our recent studies as an example to illustrate how to use the framework. Finally, we discuss possible problems and future directions for indigenous leadership studies.

Section snippets

Content of indigenous leadership research

Global Leadership and Organizational Behavioral Effectiveness (GLOBE) Project defines leadership as “the ability of an individual to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organization” (House et al., 1999: 184). According to this definition, the leader who exercises influence, the influence exercised, and the outcomes generated would all be the major components in leadership theories (Yukl, 2010). This process can be seen as the ongoing

The necessity of conducting indigenous Chinese leadership research

Western leadership research, started during the Industrial Revolution, has a century-long history. Chinese leadership research, started about thirty years ago when China started its economic reforms, is still a relatively recent phenomenon (Zhao & Jiang, 2009). Moreover, much of the research on Chinese leadership so far has been followed the same basic pattern — finding Chinese phenomena that exemplify some existing theory or theories developed in the West (Barney & Zhang, 2009). Western

Implications for leadership research

With the fast economic development in non-Western countries such as BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the leadership practices of these nations have been largely noticed, but hardly studied (Leung, 2012). Leadership research is a typical domain in which local practices are poorly understood because only theories developed in the West are used. It is out of the need to understand indigenous leadership practices that we propose a three-step methodology integrating the

Acknowledgements

The project was funded as a major project by the National Science Foundation of China (71032002). The authors would like to thank Professor C. A. Schriesheim for his valuable suggestions during the development process of this paper. They also wish to thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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