The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority. However in order to be successful in influencing others, a manager must be able to know what their subordinates think. With the knowledge of subordinate¡¦s perceptions, managers can perfect their use of influence tactics and then be able to easily perform influence on others. One of the most important aspects that can influence perspectives is culture. In Hofstede¡¦s (1980) study it was found that Chinese societies are high in power distance and can be classified as collective societies. This is the result of Confucianism, which spreads values of social order and harmony. In this society, relationships are extremely important. Another characteristic of the Chinese is that they are elitists, and have a deep-rooted belief that education can raise a person to higher levels in society, thus we can see the importance of having expertise. Because of the high power distance which implies inequality and love of power, and collectivity which implies the difference in treatment between in-group and out-group members, it can be inferred that the Chinese tend to have Machiavellian personality. Thus we can see that the three main factors that influence the acceptableness of different influence tactics are expertise, relationships and Machiavellianism.
The purpose of this study is to examine influence tactics from the subordinate¡¦s perspective, and to explore the relationship between expertise, personal relationships, Machiavellianism and influence strategies. The results show that (1) the closeness of the relationship is the most important factor to consider when choosing influence tactics, the closer the relationship, the more tactics one can use, both hard and soft tactics would be acceptable, (2) If the manager is known as having expertise, it would be best to use soft tactics, however subordinates will also accept hard tactics from managers who have a higher education level, (3) there was no significant relationship between influence tactics and Machiavellianism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0827104-115103 |
| Date | 27 August 2004 |
| Creators | chang, Joanne |
| Contributors | Jen-Jsung Huang, I-Heng Chen, Chin-Kang Jen |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0827104-115103 |
| Rights | unrestricted, Copyright information available at source archive |
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