Cross-cultural Leadership: The Power of Assertiveness and Social Approval

This research aims to investigate the factors affecting leadership effectiveness perception across Chinese and American cultures. Past literature suggested Chinese and Americans have different beliefs about causal agency. Chinese primarily believe in social agency-people around the agent have the power to change the agent's actions whereas Americans primarily believe in autonomous agency-the agents themselves have the power to change their actions. We propose that this difference extends to their beliefs about what kinds of influencing strategies employed by leaders would be effective across cultures. We predict that Chinese followers would perceive a leader who values social approval as more effective than would American followers and vice versa for a leader who emphasize assertive persuasion strategy. We test our hypothesis in two studies. In Study 1, we will content analyze essays written by Chinese and American MBA students about their idealized leaders. We will code the content in terms of personal assertiveness and social approval characteristics. In Study 2, a quasi-experimental study, we first measure Chinese and American participants' agency belief and then ask them to read a scenario, which depicts a leader featuring either an assertive style or a social approval style. Participants then rate how effective the leader is.