A leadership landscape for effective human resource management

Citation

Zhang, Y. (2012), "A leadership landscape for effective human resource management", Chinese Management Studies, Vol. 6 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/cms.2012.32306baa.002

A leadership landscape for effective human resource management

Article Type: Guest Editor foreword From: Chinese Management Studies, Volume 6, Issue 2

The academic is seeing rapidly surfacing researches in the domain of Chinese management conducted dynamically by scholars from China and from other countries. The richness and relevance of such researches are disclosed at the 1st Global Chinese Management Studies Conference, Singapore, organized by Sun Tzu Art of War Institute in August 2011. This issue is the result of a selection and collation of the papers presented at the Conference under the theme of “HRM and Leadership”.

The coverage of these papers enfolds scopes of leadership with currently relevant topics, and spans of management of human resources both in public and private sectors. The topics include authority leadership (AL), balanced leadership, leaders’ emotional intelligence (EI), moral leadership, servant leadership, and destructive leadership (DL) in the Chinese cultural contexts, occupational commitment, working pressure and motivation, public service motivation (PSM) and job satisfaction (JS), harmonious HRM in non-state-owned enterprises, and traditionality in procedural fairness perceptions of employment.

An overview of the papers shows the following characteristics:

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  they are based on empirical researches with original designs of instruments;

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  they provide in-depth analyses and discussions on the implications for both researchers and practitioners in Chinese public as well as business organizations; and

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  their findings contribute to the establishment of Chinese management theories, and to the building of a wide range of Chinese management practices.

More importantly, the efforts and achievements of these researchers are forming up part of a chain of systematic researches in Chinese management.

More specifically, the areas and main contributions of these papers are displayed, respectively, as follows.

Ning Hongyu, Zhou Mingjian, Lu Qiang and Wen Liqun contribute a paper entitled “Exploring relationship between authority leadership and organizational citizenship behavior in China: the role of collectivism”. The authors investigate the relationship between AL and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) in the Chinese organizational context, and explore the role of collectivism in analyzing the relationship between AL and OCB at individual and team levels.

Yenming Zhang and Suan Fong Foo contribute a paper entitled “Balanced leadership: perspectives, principles and practices”. The authors address the issue of maintaining balance while moving ahead as a challenge for organizational leaders who concern for effective leadership. They examine the philosophical base for balanced leadership and tap effective practices of balanced leadership in organizational lives through the aspects of:

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  leaders’ steady dispositions;

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  harmonious human relations;

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  categorization of the magnitudes of change for improvement; and

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  an integration of eastern and western models of balanced leadership.

Ding Xiaqi, Tian Kun, Yang Chongsen and Gong Sufang contribute a paper entitled “Abusive supervision and LMX: leaders’ emotional intelligence as antecedent variable and trust as consequence variable”. The authors explore how leaders’ EI influences subordinates’ trust, and examine the roles of abusive supervision and leader-member exchange (LMX) in this process. From their investigation with findings of significant impacts of supervisors’ EI on the personal trust of subordinates, the authors put forward:

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  an emphasis on EI in the process of selecting leaders; and

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  a well-designed training to improve managers’ emotional skills.

Hong Lu, Wenquan Ling, Yuju Wu and Yi Liu contribute a paper entitled “A Chinese perspective on the content and structure of destructive leadership”. The authors explore the fundamental content and the structure of DL within Chinese cultural contexts. Examining the four factors of DL (corruption, excoriation on subordinates, abuse of subordinates and the loss of professional morality), which are relevant to the Chinese culture and current Chinese organizational management, they have tapped the practical implications in improving workplace leadership behavior in Chinese organizations.

Min Wu contributes a paper entitled “The influencing mechanism of moral leadership in China”. The author examines:

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  the mediating roles of trust-in-supervisor and psychological empowerment dimensions in the relationship between moral leadership and work performance; and

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  the interactions of moral and benevolent leadership, and the interactions of moral and authoritarian leadership, on trust-in-supervisor.

Finding out the interactive effect of moral and benevolent leadership, and the insignificant interactive effect of moral and authoritarian leadership on trust-in-supervisor, this study helps to understand the psychological mechanism of moral leadership effectiveness on work performance.

Ling Yuan and Jian Li contribute a paper entitled “Occupational commitment and labor relations in firms: an empirical study in China”. The authors examine occupational commitment and labor relations in Chinese firm settings through the four dimensions of:

1. 1.

   affective commitment;

2. 2.

   normative commitment;

3. 3.

   accumulated costs; and

4. 4.

   limited alternatives, to find out positive interrelations between the four dimensions and labor relations.

This study helps researchers and practitioners in the field of human resource management in firms in China to address the increasing employee career awareness and employee commitment.

Ting Wang and Quanquan Zheng contribute a paper entitled “Working pressure does not necessarily undermine self-determined motivation: the moderating role of social identity”. Connecting the social identity (SI) theory with the self-determination theory, this study investigates the role of SI in buffering the effect of working pressure. The authors suggest that managers motivate employees by emphasizing their perception of SI (group-membership), which is consistent with traditional Chinese management thoughts and values, and offer an approach of group-level-based extension of the self-determination theory, to examine the causal relationships among SI, task deadline and identified motivation.

Xiaogang Cun contributes a paper entitled “Public service motivation and job satisfaction, organizational citizenship behavior”. The author examines the cause-effect chain between PSM and consequence variables, including OCB and employee JS in the traditional culture of the public sector of Guangzhou. Finding out that there exist significant differences between groups in the PSM level, and correlations between PSM, and JS, OCB, the author reveals the dynamics in these relationships typical in the Chinese cultural background, and offers a healthier and more sustainable practice model in the public human resource management in China.

Yanzhen He and Tingting Cai contribute a paper entitled “The ethics of employment relation in China: a meta-analysis”. The authors critically evaluate the extant literature on ethics of employment relation in China with a meta-analytic approach to identifying the business ethical issues from different results. They have found that there exist some disadvantages, and the issues of ethics of employment relation in China should draw more concern in both the theory and practical domains. Such an insight helps researchers to understand the ethics of employment relation in China.

Qingjuan Wang, Rick D. Hackett, Xun Cui and Yiming Zhang contribute a paper entitled “Cultural differences and applicants’ procedural fairness perceptions: a test of a Chinese culture-based model”. The authors examine Chinese traditionality as a predictor of applicants’ procedural fairness perceptions of employment processes, and try to use traditionality as a moderator of perceptions-outcomes relationships in their test. They have found that:

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  “respect for authority”, as a component of traditionality, positively predicts procedural fairness perceptions; and

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  such perceptions, in turn, predict increasing possibility of recommending the employer to others, supervisory ratings of job performance, and decreasing turnover intentions.

This study helps to enhance the awareness of the importance of organizational justice in the selection of qualified employees.

Yenming Zhang, Tzu-Bin Lin and Suan Fong Foo contribute a paper entitled “Servant leadership: a preferred style of school leadership in Singapore”. Between “servant leadership” and “authoritative leadership” styles, the authors examine which leadership style is perceived a preferred one in the public sector in Singapore. Demonstrating comparisons in the acceptability between servant and authoritative styles, they have found that “servant leadership” is more acceptable than “authoritative leadership” because the former reflects a better use of leaders’ power; and yields a greater positive impact on staff’s professional life. While pointing out servant leadership to be increasingly relevant in organizations, this empirical study provides organizational leaders with insights on the relevance and effectiveness of their leading styles.

Leadership of an organization, as we know, cannot be addressed effectively without looking into the dimension of leading the people in the organization, and the dimension of managing the people-orientation culture, which is in line with what is emphasized in Flamholtz and Randle’s (2011) Corporate Culture. As seen in the papers in this issue, the authors address the above two dimensions with a good number of cases and up-to-date examples. From a larger perspective, to understand a country’s economy, it is crucial to know the lives of successful businesses in that country (Goldstein, in Zhang et al., 2011). In this respect, readers will find the papers collectively providing an approach of leadership and HRM of the businesses in China and the other countries concerned.

Yenming ZhangGuest Editor