Research On The Influence Of Parenting Styles On Managers’ Life Span Leadership Development

In order to enhance the market competitiveness of enterprises,management personnel with effective leadership skills are sought after by enterprises,and thus the cultivation and development of managers’ leadership skills have been a critical area of focus for both business and academia community.In the beginning,the research direction of leadership development was mainly focused on the development and training of the employees’ leadership skills in enterprises.As the research went deeper,some scholars found that the effectiveness of leadership training organized by companies was minimal.A significant number of managers involved in corporate leadership training believe that leadership improvement efforts would have been more effective if they had been conducted at an earlier point in time.Some researchers also point out that corporate employees have foundational leadership development experiences during their pre-adolescent years before they enter the work organization and that these experiences are critical to managing in adulthood.Since individuals grow up mainly in the family environment during the early years,parents play a significant role in the early leadership development of managers.To break through the bottlenecks encountered in current management research and practice,this study examines relationship between parenting styles and managerial leadership development to reveal the persistent influence of the early family environment on leadership to fill the gaps in existing leadership development research and provide theoretical guidance for practice.Based on the current research findings,this paper establishes a conceptual model and research hypotheses with the path from parenting styles to leadership effectiveness via basic personal and interpersonal skills and managerial leadership.Based on the principles of scientificity and validity,this paper designed the initial questionnaire for the study,and refined the initial questionnaire for use in the formal research based on consultation with experts,interviews with corporate employees,small-scale pretests,and group discussions.Data were collected from two large companies in China,and a final sample of 418 valid data was collected.This research first examined the reliability and validity of the data and then tested the direct,moderating,and mediating impacts among the variables through structural equation modeling and bootstrapping.The results of the empirical analysis showed that authoritative parenting had a significant positive effect on self-regulation and social astuteness,and authoritarian and permissive parenting had a significant negative effect on self-regulation and social astuteness.Parenting styles significantly affected leader role-efficacy by self-regulation and social astuteness.Leader role-efficacy had a significant positive effect on both leadership endorsement and team performance.The identification with parents significantly strengthened the positive relationship between authoritative parenting and self-regulation and social astuteness,and identification with parents significantly strengthened the negative relationship between authoritarian parenting and self-regulation and social astuteness.In addition,identification with parents significantly moderated the indirect effects of parenting styles on leader role-efficacy.Specifically,the higher the level of identification with parents,the greater the indirect positive effect of authoritative parenting on leader role-efficacy,and the higher level of identification with parents,the greater the indirect negative effect of authoritarian and permissive parenting on leader role-efficacy.Based on the results of the empirical analysis,the below conclusions are obtained:(1)Parenting styles have a critical impact on the leadership effectiveness of managers.Parenting styles affect children’s primary personal and interpersonal skills,which in turn affect their leader role-efficacy in organizational management and ultimately their leadership effectiveness.Authoritative parenting satisfies children’s developmental conditioning and social leadership fundamentals so that they are believed to be successful in their leadership roles when taking on organizational management tasks,promoting leadership endorsement by their subordinates and improving team performance.In contrast,children of authoritarian and permissive parenting continue to accumulate factors that are detrimental to the development of fundamental leadership competencies,resulting in a lack of confidence in their ability to perform the behaviors that constitute the leadership role,which in turn is detrimental to the leadership endorsement by their subordinates and reduces the team performance as a whole.(2)Authoritative parenting is the best parenting style for developing children’s leader skills.The low level of control by authoritative parenting parents,which elicits compliance with a specific norm in their children,can maximize the internalization of the norm and further help the child develop self-motivation in the implementation of that specific norm.Moreover,as children grow up,they are more receptive to positive parental responses such as autonomy support and warmth and care due to their heightened need for autonomy and respect.Through its low level of control and high level of responsive behavior,authoritative parenting provides reasons behind their actions,affirms their children’s behaviors,understands their children’s feelings,and provides choices for their children.Authoritative parenting meets children’s growth needs and facilitates the process of internalizing their psychological and behavioral learning,which enhances their ability to regulation.In addition,authoritative parenting helps children develop social sensitivity by fostering positive emotions and internalizing interpersonal communication skills.These foundational leadership developments positively influence children’s leader role-efficacy in organizational management and further enhance their leadership effectiveness.(3)Children with high identification with parents who become leaders amplify the impact of their parenting experiences.Identification with parents reflects children’s understanding of and attitudes toward their parents’ values and behaviors,and children often choose their parents as objects of imitation as they grow up,gaining life experience by learning from their emotions and behaviors.Children with high identification with parents consider their relationships with their parents more important than their relationships with other people,and they tend to invest more time in learning their parents’ values and thus become closer to their parents in terms of emotions and behaviors.Thus,when children have high identification with parents,they will consciously or unconsciously apply varying degrees of parental values to their own psychology and behavior,which in turn affects self-confidence in performing managerial tasks at work.(4)Leader role-efficacy can significantly enhance leadership effectiveness.As crucial nodes in the organization,managers’ beliefs about the leadership skills they possess and their judgments about their ability to lead their teams are essential factors that influence their subordinates and teams.In organizations,leaders also play the role of mentoring and helping team members.Effective leaders can naturally coach their subordinates and communicate and share appropriately to motivate their employees,ultimately gaining leadership endorsement from their subordinates.In addition,when managers are more effective in their leadership roles,they build a productive work environment of mutual trust and respect,allowing team members to be open and honest with each other,and leading to improved performance of the entire team.This research has the following innovative points:(1)This study understands the development of managerial life cycle leadership from a retrospective view.The current research on the leadership development process is mainly limited to corporate organizations.However,there are few studies on leadership development in childhood and adolescence,and the influence of the life cycle,especially early parenting,is not systematically considered.Based on the life span leader development theory,social learning theory,and primary socialization theory,this research integrates management,psychology,and sociology to explore the impact of children’s growth stage interaction experiences with their parents on their organization leadership,breaking through previous research limited to leadership development in organizations from a prospective view,and expanding the application of the cutting-edge life span leader development theory.(2)This study reveals the mechanisms by which parenting styles affect the effectiveness of children’s leadership as managers.There are few previous studies on the potential mechanisms by which family upbringing influences leadership effectiveness.This research establishes the mechanism by which parenting styles influence leadership effectiveness,employing self regulation/social astuteness and leader role-efficacy as mediating variables.By establishing and testing the mechanism,this research reveals the “black box” of parenting styles on children’s leadership effectiveness and deepens the understanding of the internal logic mechanism between family upbringing and leadership effectiveness,thus helping to understand why parenting styles have positive or negative consequences on children’s leadership effectiveness as managers,and filling the gap of research in this field.(3)This study explores the indirect factors of life leadership development,namely the mediating role of self-regulation and social astuteness.This research supports the idea of exploring indirect factors of life leadership development from the perspective of psychological and behavioral development among early family factors of managers and validates the role of self-regulation and social astuteness in mediating the relationship between parenting styles and leader role-efficacy.Therefore,this research helps fill the gap in research on managers’ early developmental factors affecting leader role-efficacy,deepens the understanding of the effects of life leadership development,and enriches the research on self-regulation and social astuteness as indirect factors.(4)This study analyzes the boundary conditions of life leadership development,i.e.,the moderating role of identification with parents.The research responds to the call to explore the boundary conditions between early individual factors and life leadership development outcomes,and also verifies that when children have high identification with parents,they apply more parental values to their own psychology and behavior,which in turn affects confidence in their ability to perform managerial tasks at work,which fills the gap in previous research.This study thus improves the research on life development of leadership,deepens the understanding of the effects of parenting styles,and enriches the empirical research on identification with parents as a boundary condition.