| Enterprise culture refers to the basic beliefs, values, standards and behavior patterns followed by all the corporate members and formed under a social condition. Management of enterprise culture has become the hot spot issue in management theory studies and is also one of the management modes highly praised by business managers. Since the enterprise culture construction of a joint venture is affected by different backgrounds in areas including politics, economy and culture, cultural differences of both parties in the joint venture run throughout many levels of the operation. As the top managers who are responsible for resource operation and business performance of the entire enterprise, they not only represent interests of different shareholders, but they are also the creator and motivator of enterprise culture. Their influences on enterprise culture are always achieved through their leadership behavior. Aimed at researches in their personal traits, leadership behavior and influences on the enterprise culture of joint ventures under different cultural conditions, this paper has made the following innovative achievements.(1) Empirical Researches on the Relationship between Personal Traits and Leadership Behavior of Top ManagersAs the top managers who are responsible for resource operation and business performance of the entire enterprise, they assume arduous tasks bearing on corporate survival and development like formulating corporate strategies, monitoring corporate environment and deciding major events. Meanwhile, they are often the creator and motivator of enterprise culture. During their daily management activities, they can influence the morale and work attitude of the staff through their leadership behavior. The influences are mainly reflected on the handling of various specific issues and their personal traits will have impact on the leadership behavior adopted by them in addressing different issues. Based on the presumption, researches are developed targeting the relationship between personal traits of top managers and their leadership behavior. Empirical analysis is made on the influences on leadership behavior of their different personal traits through methods of questionnaire and statistical analysis.By analyzing the existing research results, personal traits of top managers are measured from5dimensionalities including extraversion, openness, preciseness, affinity and neuroticism proposed by Costa&McCrae, which is adopted by the study. Leadership behavior of top managers is measured by three-dimensional leadership behavior models including task type, relationship type and transformation type proposed by Yukl. Based on the existing measurement scales, alterations are made according to the practical situation of the investigator and Questionnaire of Personal Traits of Top Managers and Questionnaire of Leadership Behavior of Top Managers are proposed. The following conclusions are made after investigations into the relationship between personal traits and leadership behavior of top managers through statistical analysis on questionnaire results.①Significant impacts on the leadership behavior of three types are made by the five dimensional personal traits including openness, preciseness, extraversion, affinity and neuroticism of top managers, but are different in impact degree and direction.②Preciseness and affinity personalities exert positive and negative influences, respectively, on task-based leadership behavior and negative and positive influences,respectively, on relationship-based leadership behavior. Therefore, top managers with these two different personal traits of preciseness and affinity should be placed in appropriate jobs.③Since openness and extraversion personalities exert great impacts on innovative leadership behavior, a senior manager with relatively strong innovative capabilities should possess not only all-inclusive spirit but also outgoing personality so that he or she can strengthen his own communication skills and promote corporate innovations.④Neuroticism has negative influences on transformational leadership behavior and people with neurotic personalities are often lack of courage to take responsibilities, which will obstruct corporate innovations.(2) Research on the Relationship of the Leader Behavior of Joint Ventures’ Top Managers, Cultural Differences and Enterprise Culture1) Structural Researches on Cultural Differences of Joint VenturesAs the core of corporate management activities, middle and top managers are not only organizers of corporate internal processes, but also communicators of corporate external relationships. As middle and top managers in joint ventures, they have profound and concrete knowledge of the cultural differences faced by enterprises. Applying the method of focus group interviews into studies on cultural differences, this paper makes focus group interviews on the issue of cultural differences targeting middle and top managers in joint ventures. By a series of steps including "deciding interview subjects""formulating interview index","deciding interview objects" and "arranging interview data" so as to determine17factors of cultural differences in joint ventures including "attitude towards job transformation","attitude towards overtime work","knowledge of authority","obedience to senior authority’s orders","definition of work arrangement", "autonomy in work","communication model","execution of rules and regulations""sharing and corporation","award pattern","decision-making style","relationship between human feelings and tasks","time sense","team spirit","compromise and splitting the differences","subordinate authorization" and "duty undertaking".Based on17elements of joint ventures’cultural differences, the design of the Questionnaire of the Cultural Differences of the Sino-Foreign Joint Ventures has referred to the research result of cultural differences at home and abroad, and combined depth interviews of enterprise managers as well as expert advisories. Two factors of cultural differences, namely,"sharing and cooperating" and "team spirit", have been eliminated according to the result of the questionnaires’descriptive statistics, and the exploratory factor analysis of the remaining15factors has been carried out. Then according to the result of this analysis, confirmatory factor analysis has also been conducted, the result of which shows that the structure of cultural differences in Sino-foreign joint ventures consists of the following three dimensionalities:①Psychological factors, which include four items, namely,"knowledge of authority","attitude toward job transformation","attitude toward overtime work" and "time sense". These items reflect psychological differences such as cognition, attitude and sense, etc..②Behavioral factors, which include six items, namely,"relationship between human feelings and tasks","definition of work arrangement","obedience to senior authority’s orders","autonomy in work","execution of rules and regulations","compromise and splitting the differences". These items embody the behavioral differences among joint venture employees.③Institutional factors, which include five items, namely,"communication model""decision-making style","subordinate authorization","duty undertaking" and "award pattern". These items involve the institutional differences of Sino-foreign joint ventures.Psychological, behavioral and institutional factors together constitute the three dimensionalities, which also interact with each other. Among them, psychological factors are the core of the cultural differences in Sino-foreign joint ventures. The differences of employees at home and abroad in aspects such as attitude and value can directly affect their way of act and management mode; the everyday behavior of employees is not only the outward manifestation of their psychological activity, but also the result of current management system; the differences of Chinese and foreign management system not only is affected by factors such as economic system and employees’education level, but also should fit employees’thought and behavior. 2) Research on the Relationship of the Leader Behavior of Joint Ventures’Top Managers, Cultural Differences and Enterprise CultureLeader behavior, which refers to the behavior of managers when exercising leadership, decides the form of enterprise culture and has a great impact on the formation of the enterprise culture. Top managers, who take a leading role in cultural construction, convey their cultural ideas by constant official or non-official communication, so as to promote the formation of employees’common value. Meanwhile, the management style, way of communication, and code of conduct of managers themselves will exert great influence on enterprise culture. Cultural differences of joint ventures will cause all kinds of clashes in communication, working process and way of management inside the enterprise. And these clashes in turn will influence the formation of enterprises’ organizational culture. This research discusses the influence of leader behavior and cultural differences on joint ventures’culture through the method of empirical analysis.This research has designed the Questionnaire of the Enterprise Culture of the Sino-Foreign Joint Ventures based on the enterprise culture scale organized by Wallach and others, and raised four dimensionalities of enterprise culture—"innovation","concordance","collaboration" and "adventure"--through exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis of cultural investigation, and relevant questionnaires has also been designed.The following conclusion is reached through regression analysis of the results of the Questionnaire of the Cultural Differences of the Sino-Foreign Joint Ventures and the Questionnaire of the Enterprise Culture of the Sino-Foreign Joint Ventures, the Questionnaire of the Leader Behavior of Top Managers, and through research on the relationship between top managers’leader behavior, cultural differences and enterprise culture of joint ventures. All the three categories of leader behavior of top managers will influence each dimensionality of enterprise culture. Among them, task-oriented leader behavior will have a positive influence on collaboration, and a negative influence on concordance; relation-oriented leader behavior will exert a positive impact on concordance a but a negative impact on adventure; innovation-oriented leader behavior will exert a positive impact on innovation a but a negative impact on concordance;The three dimensionalities of joint ventures’cultural differences affect the four dimensionalities of enterprise culture differently.(3) Research on the Structure of Cross-Cultural Management Capabilities of the Managers in Joint Ventures For the issues of cross-cultural management in joint ventures, the structure of cross-cultural management capabilities of the managers in joint ventures consisted of management behaviors, cultural cognitive and psychological factors, has been established through ways of questionnaire and factor analysis, and suggestions, and triangulation method for the training of cross-cultural management capabilities have been proposed, aiming at characteristics of the capabilities in three dimensions. |
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