The Research On The Mechanism By Which Leadership Functions In Enterprises

In the era of knowledge-based economy, facing severer competitions and uncertain market environment, managers of Chinese enterprises should adapt to and catch up with all the changes. They must lead the employees to meet the demand of reform, relying on their mutual efforts to push their organizations ahead. Leader effectiveness is one of the most important issues in management practice, and leader-member relationship is eapecially significant. As the society develops, employees'needs, motivation and perceived organizational justice also change drastically. With traditional culture and modern culture integrating, people are more involed in questing what kinds of leadership will be more efficient, and how leadership functions in Chinese enterprises. It is quite necessary for the managers to get to know their sorbordinates, eapecially their feelings and psychological state, so as to adopt proper leadership and take management measures accordingly.The research on leadership theory has developed rapidly during the past 30 years. Leadership theory, as a theory on leadership effectiveness, is not only one of the hot issues in management science research, but also the core of organizational behaviour research. Its research achievements can be classified into three catageries, which are trait theory, behaviour theory and contingency theory. In 1985, Bass proposes transactional leadership and transformational leadership. Since then, they have been two dominant theories of leadership research. As a process of social influence, leadership is very popular all over the world, yet its concept and construct may differ among various countries. Transactional leadership and transformational leadership originate in western culture, while Chinese leadership process has bothsimilarities and uniqueness compared with them. Some researchers have found that transactional leadership and transformational leadership could not fully explain the leadership and management style of Chinese mangers. With indigenous approach, some researchers have begun to study the leadership in Chinese organizations recently, and put forward a new leadership theory—paternalistic leadership, which is featured with typical Chinese characteristics.It has been a question whether transactional leadership and transformational leadership based on western culture can really cover the characteristics of Chinese leadership, and whether paternalistic leadership based on estern culture is also applicable to Mainland Chinese enterprises? We may wonder what relationship they have. Are there any overlappings or uniqueness among them? What are the cultural connotations of leadership? Thus, the comparative study on transactional leadership, transformational leadership and paternalistic leadership is quite necessary. Besides, since previous researches on leadership mainly focus on leader effectiveness, futher researches on the mechanism through which leadership functions are badly needed.In the dissertation, the author firstly reviews the literature on the theories of leadership, organizational justice and trust, and applies social exchange theory to clarify the close relationship among them. Based on the literature review, the author set up a comprehensive theoretic model based on social exchange, which includes such variables as leadership, organizational justice, trust, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, performance and OCB, in order to explore how leadership functions in Chinese enterprises. The author has conducted dyadic study on 512 respondents in twenty-two SOEs and private enterprises in Sichuan province, and then analyzed the data of the survey with SPSS and AMOS, applying correlation analysis, variance analysis, reliability anlysis, regression analysis, structural equational modeling and other statistic methods in the study. The results of data analysis show that most hypotheses have been supported; the psychological process and mechanism by which leadership functions have been confirmed. It has been proved that leadership influences employees' working attitudes and behaviours through the mediating effect of organizational justice and trust. At the end of thedissertation, the author draws some conclusions and generalizes the contributions ofthe research from several aspects. Some ideas on future research are brought forth aswell.