One definition, different manifestations: Investigating ethical leadership in the Chinese context

The relationship between ethical leadership, conscientiousness, and moral courage from nurses' perspective

Background

Nurses’ conscientiousness and moral courage are essential to providing high quality care. Leadership is one of the factors that may be very effective in strengthening these characteristics in nurses. Among leadership styles, the ethical leadership has a special value. This study investigated the relationship between ethical leadership of nursing managers, conscientiousness, and moral courage from the nurses’ perspective.

Methods

In this cross-sectional descriptive study, 180 nurses working in hospitals of Yazd, central Iran, were selected through simple random sampling. Three questionnaires: the “Ethical Leadership”, “Conscientiousness”, and “Moral Courage” were used to collect data. Data were analyzed with SPSS20 using descriptive and analytical statistics.

Results

There was a positive and significant relationship between conscientiousness and moral courage with ethical leadership from the nurses’ perspective (P < 0.05). The relationship between conscientiousness and moral courage was also significant (P < 0.05). The regression analysis showed that ethical leadership can be considered as a predictor of conscientiousness and moral courage.

Conclusion

The relationship between ethical leadership and conscientiousness and moral courage suggests that nursing managers, by adopting such an approach in leadership, can increase conscientiousness and moral courage in nurses.

Ethical leadership in multinational companies’ control practices: culture as a moderating factor

Purpose

Determining the role of ethical leadership in the multinational companies’ (MNCs) control practices, the purpose of this paper is to extend Eisenbeiss’ (2012) four central ethical leadership orientations into multinational companies’ control contexts – the culturally diversified environment.

Design/methodology/approach

Adopting a multiple-case research design, the authors gather qualitative data from four MNC subsidiaries located in China, that connects three potentially diverse cultural contexts: German, Japanese and Chinese.

Findings

The findings of this paper confirm that ethical leadership compliance (or violation) positively (or negatively) contributes to the internalization of organizational practice transfer, moderated by cultural distance between foreign managers and subsidiaries’ employees. The results reveal that informal control and trust act as lubricants in the internalization process.

Originality/value

This paper evidences the connections between ethical leadership, organizational practice transfer and subsequent performance, along with inclusive cultural moderating factors.

The influence of cronyism on entrepreneurial resource acquisition

This research focuses on how entrepreneurs utilize cronyism to acquire resources. A case study method allowed us to explore three firms in the private property development industry in China. These firms uniquely cultivated cronyism and achieved distinctly different outcomes. Our findings highlight Chinese entrepreneurs in start-up ventures and later-stage enterprises employ cronyism. The underlying rationale for using cronyism have common and heterogeneous motivations. The similarity and distinguishing rationale also apply to the impact of cronyism. We also find two contingency working mechanisms for cronyism: entrepreneurial characteristics and a staged model for cronyism. With the firm’s growth, cronyism remains important, but firms with more community involvement outperform others. This research contributes to the theory on strategic network utilization for resource acquisition during entrepreneurial development stages. We investigate how entrepreneurial strategies can assist in adapting to the “rules of the game” while utilizing resources within the set contextual constraints.

Asian Conceptualizations of Leadership: Progresses and Challenges

By investigating broadly a contingency approach and implicit leadership theoretical perspectives with a multilevel lens as a starting point, this review highlights the potential for Asian conceptualizations of leadership. More specifically, by highlighting the important contingent role national culture plays in influencing leadership effectiveness, we review Asian conceptualizations of leadership that exist (e.g., paternalistic leadership style, paternalism, and guanxi in the leadership setting) in the literature and the findings that have been found in a relatively selective manner. This also allows us to advance the notion of a culturally contingent leadership perspective by developing the notion of hierarchical social exchange and various modalities associated with such a relationship. By so doing, this review enables us to underscore the advantages as well as challenges associated with Asian conceptualizations of leadership as well as future research directions that need to be undertaken to more firmly establish their utility to general leadership literature.

The global leadership capacity wheel

Purpose

The purpose of this paper was to examine the definitions of global leadership and indigenous leadership, identify leadership capacities inherent in human resource development (HRD) and determine relationships of the three as a means to develop a model to aid and guide opportunities for future research.

Design/methodology/approach

Following a two-stage integrative literature review of HRD, global and indigenous leadership literature, the grounded theory constant comparative method established 31 positive and 1 negative leadership domains, and respective capacities, and compare domains from literature.

Findings

The Global Leadership Capacity Wheel informs researchers of strengths and areas for additional research, has resulted in a more complete model of global leadership and calls for increased clarity for leadership capacity model development, especially for complex, global environments and local constructs and theories.

Research limitations/implications

Although the literature had adequate representation in the business and organizational acumen and managing people and relationships central global leadership domains, more research and reporting is required for managing self and indigenous leadership capacity development subdomains.

Practical implications

Leadership development is a high priority and core function of HRD. The Global Leadership Capacity Wheel provides a tool for scholars and practitioners to guide global leadership development programs and research.

Social implications

Understanding the relationships of leadership capacities from global and indigenous perspectives is helpful to examine cultural, identity and macro-contextual dimensions and their influence on leadership.

Originality/value

The Global Leadership Capacity Wheel provides a type of road-map, a holistic representation, in the context of developing global leaders in today’s complex environment.

The Effect of Spiritual Leadership on Employee Effectiveness: An Intrinsic Motivation Perspective

Drawing on spiritual leadership theory and intrinsic motivation theory, we proposed a homologous multilevel model to explore the effectiveness of spiritual leadership on employees’ task performance, knowledge sharing behaviors and innovation behaviors at the individual level. With questionnaires rated by 306 pairs of employees and their supervisors in 26 teams from the energy industry in mainland China, we conduct multilevel analysis to examine our hypotheses. The results show that spiritual leadership was positively related to employee task performance, knowledge sharing behaviors and innovation behavior, when we controlled for possible confounding effects of moral leadership and benevolent leadership, and ruled out alternative explanation of ethical leadership. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.