ABSTRACT
In leadership research, Western leaderships are quite dominant while insufficient attention has been paid to Eastern leaderships, including Chinese leadership. Paternalistic leadership, an indigenous Chinese leadership, is prevalent in Chinese society given that it has been bounded by the cultural tradition. Based on social exchange theory and social identity theory, one propose that the benevolence and morality components of paternalistic leadership may strengthen while authoritarianism may undermine subordinates trust-in-supervisor, which in turn affects subordinates in-role performance and extra-role performance. Hence, one expects to find that Mainland subordinates psychological reactions to paternalistic leadership could be somewhat different from Taiwan subordinates. Paternalistic leadership is an indigenous Chinese leadership theory, which was originally from the ideology of Confucian. Building on Silin's (1976), Redding's (1990) and Cheng's (1995) work, Farh and Cheng (2000) explain paternalistic leadership as a leadership style composed of morality, benevolence and authoritarianism. Before examining the structural relationships, we tested the dimensionalities of paternalistic leadership by using confirmatory factor analysis.
