What is Strategic Leadership and How Does it Matter? The Case of China

We define strategic leadership as the gestalt pattern of how business-level and interpersonal-level leadership activities are configured in the pursuit of organizational learning. Building on entrepreneurial theory of the firm, we argue that strategic leaders are essentially entrepreneurs. At the business level, strategic leadership is entrepreneurship by means of organizational learning. At the interpersonal level, strategic leadership is managerial leadership with the objective of leading organizational members to help the organization learn. On the basis of their effects on organizational learning, we characterize interpersonal-level leadership styles as enabling, coercive, or relationship-nurturing. In the Chinese cultural context, Taoist leadership is enabling, Legalist leadership is coercive, and Confucian leadership is relationship-nurturing. Different combinations of the interpersonal-level leadership styles with the business-level entrepreneurial orientation produce different effects on exploratory or exploitative organizational learning. We tested the hypotheses derived from the gestalt model with 437 companies operating in Pearl River Delta of China.