published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Education / Master / Master of Science in Information Technology in Education

Most analysts study leadership succession in communist states as a "crisis" which ensues after the death of a dominant leader. This study takes an alternative approach. It is a survey of provisions for leadership succession in the People's Republic, of China. This involves a comparison of the strategies and motivations of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping in providing for their own succession. Deng Xiaoping's more extensive provisions for leadership succession during the CCP's transition towards a more institutionalized one-party bureaucratic rule are likely to be more durable than Mao's provisions in the earlier period. Nevertheless, guarantees of smooth and regularized succession, especially of protégés promoted on the basis of personal ties within the leadership core, may be impossible to obtain. Mao's provisions were aimed largely at what he saw as a probable, but deplorable, bureaucratic future of the PRC. Deng, on the other hand, perceives an element of opportunity in the succession process. He has tried to provide leadership that will, in his estimation, be better able to bring about China's modernization. In both leaders' provisions for succession, the elevation to the status of "heir apparent" of individuals has been a political liability to those individuals, especially when their promotion is perceived to be based largely on personal ties to the dominant leader. This liability becomes more pronounced in a period of bureaucratic, collective leadership. Because of his shifting policy preferences, his status as charismatic leader, and the ambitious nature of his protégés, Mao Zedong was unsuccessful in providing for his own succession. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand, has been successful in cultivating a reserve of young, well-educated cadres. These provisions, because they are extensive and exist in a more subdued, consensus-oriented political environment, may well be Deng's most enduring legacy. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

This project was conducted with the objective of measuring differences between U.S. American and Chinese preferences for specific leadership characteristics and behaviors. An online survey was administered to U.S. American and Chinese nationals working in U.S.-based multinational corporations (MNCs). Respondents were asked to indicate the extent to which they considered 112 characteristics or behaviors to contribute to or inhibit effective leadership. The data were statistically analyzed to measure variances in how the two samples responded to each item, and to provide insight into what characteristics or behaviors contribute to or inhibit effective leadership in China and in the U.S. The research findings were compared with cross-cultural/intercultural leadership literature, in particular the global leadership and organizational behavior effectiveness project (GLOBE). Several of the findings of this study are similar to those previous research projects conducted on U.S. and Chinese people. Specifically, charismatic and team oriented leadership, which previous research suggests are universal facilitators of effective leadership, were found to facilitate effective leadership. Additionally, many of the individual leader attributes found to facilitate effective leadership in the U.S and China respectively, were also reported to do so in this study. However, the findings also suggest that Chinese orientation towards uncertainty may be weakening, whereas the U.S. data provide a moderate level of support that suggests that the U.S. orientation along the in-group collectivism dimension is strengthening. Unfortunately, due to an unexpectedly small sample size, the findings of this project are limited in their utility. This project did, however, provide invaluable insight into the process of leadership research in China that will inform the design and further define the scope of the second phase of the research.

Organizational leaders often seek to hire and retain innovative employees as a source of competitive advantage. Both transformational leadership and effectively managed workplace diversity have been theorized and shown to lead to increased employee creative performance at work; however, a full model of the relationships between leadership and the multi-dimensional construct of workplace diversity has not yet been tested. Using a sample of 371 employees in three Chinese high-technology firms matched with 64 supervisors collected at three time points, this study theorized and tested a moderated mediation path model in which transformational leadership and diversity climate were predicted to significantly interact to influence the workplace diversity constructs of organizational justice and organizational identity, which in turn, influence individual creative performance. Based on major theories of leadership, diversity, and creativity, several partial mediation hypotheses are presented, including diversity climate as a mediator of the relationship between transformational leadership and creative performance as well as organizational justice and organizational identity as mediators of the relationship between the interaction of transformational leadership and diversity climate and creative performance. Several single- and multilevel path analyses were conducted to test the model, using two measures of creative performance: self-ratings and supervisor ratings. The results showed that the interaction of transformational leadership and diversity climate significantly predicted self-rated creative performance, and organizational identity significantly predicted supervisor ratings of creative performance. In addition, transformational leadership was found to significantly predict diversity climate and organizational justice was a significant predictor of organizational identity. Finally, transformational leadership had a significant indirect effect on creative performance through diversity climate. The contributions of this study to three major bodies of literature, as well as the implications of the results for research and practice, are discussed.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Education / Master / Master of Education