Leadership in the Asia Pacific

A Global Research Perspective

Chris Rowley, David Ulrich

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134906246
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book examines the vital nature of the subject of leadership in Asia and looks, in particular, at the processes and practices within the Asia Pacific region. It describes how leadership processes differ across various regions and teaches managers how to better employ these processes in order to improve the success of their organisations. The work moves beyond looking only at Western ideas and explores further leadership perspectives based on differing cultural foundations. It considers the influences of Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism and Legalism and also reflects the character of different leadership styles, such as paternalistic, benevolent transactional and transformational styles, as well as authentic and entrepreneurial approaches. Throughout the text, a wide range of international contributors adopt an array of leadership and other theories, cases, sectors and methods to discuss leadership in Asia.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Asia Pacific Business Review.

Introduction: setting the scene for leadership in Asia

Chris Rowley^a and Dave Ulrich^b

^aCass Business School, City University, London, UK and HEAD Foundation, Singapore; ^bRoss School of Business, University of Michigan and Partner, The RBL Group

Leadership continues to be an on-going focus of scholarship, despite its contested definitions, meanings and nature. The Asian region has become an important area of inquiry with its rapid and enormous economic growth and potential, size, and population. Our work will accomplish multiple purposes. We will better understand how leadership processes and practices are both different and the same in countries within Asia. We will help managers learn how to become better leaders by recognizing and adopting successful practices. As a result, we hope to move beyond the overly dominant and ethnocentric Western leadership literature and explore Asian leadership on the basis of differing cultural foundations. Through innovative Asian leadership practices, we anticipate that Asia will not only export products and services, but in the near term will also export leadership processes and practices.

Introduction

Media interest in leadership and leaders in Asia continues apace and unabated. From Japan, this ranges from the unfolding tragedy and culture clash at Olympus to the snipping about the ‘depth of bow’ given by non-Japanese CEOs of Japanese companies and the short-lived tenure of the US-born chief executive of Nippon Sheet Glass. From South Korea, there are the continuing sagas and shenanigans of the scions of the South Korean chaebol. From Thailand and Indonesia, there are leaders’ close links with politics and what is seen as ‘crony capitalism’. From China, there is the recent spectacular unravelling in true Icarus fashion of the career of Bo Xilai and now the widening fall out of this to the family’s business interests, such as China Everbright, Beijing Liuhexing Group and Yungkong Security Printing. This interest is also apparent in academia and business.

The main areas of leadership research are expertly reviewed in Avolio et al. (2009), showing the widening conceptualization of leadership. The term’s prefix has spread, from paternalist, benevolent and autocratic and more transactional types to new-genre and transformational (charismatic, inspirational and visionary); situational; entrepreneurial; authentic; cognitive psychology; complexity; shared, collective or distributed; leader-member exchange; followership; substitute; servant, spirituality, cross-cultural to e-leadership and gate keeping.

In our collection, we bring together two streams of inquiry to move beyond media interest to management scholarship. First, leadership continues to be an on-going focus of scholarship, despite its contested definitions, meanings and nature. Second, the Asian region has become an important area of inquiry with its rapid and enormous economic growth and potential, size and population. The research in this collection examines the important topic of leadership, in particular the processes and practices within the Asia Pacific region. This work will accomplish multiple purposes. We will better understand how leadership processes and practices are both different and the same in countries within Asia. We will help managers learn how to become better leaders by recognizing and adopting successful practices. As a result of this work, we hope to move beyond the overly dominant and ethnocentric Western leadership literature and explore Asian leadership based on differing cultural foundations. This work follows the footsteps of the classic seminal work of Hofstede (2001) and those who followed him (House et al. 2004). Through innovative Asian leadership practices reported in this collection, we anticipate that Asia will not only export products and services, but in the near term will also export leadership processes and practices.

Consistent with the Asian context, our collection includes the philosophical influences of Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, Legalism as well as Dharma in Buddhism. This influence of traditional Asian values for modern management is elaborated in recent works, particularly vis-à-vis what is called the ‘Confucian inheritance’ (Warner 2011) and its links to cognition (Steers 2012) as well as elsewhere (Lytras and Ordonez de Pablos 2008). Indeed, part of the context is collectivism (see Walumbwa and Lawler 2003). In relation to this are the following interesting findings. Collectivists with transformational leaders generate more ideas and react more positively, while for individualists it is transactional leaders who do this (Jung and Avolio 1999; Walumbwa et al. 2007). In other collectivist cultures (Japan), transformational leadership led to fewer innovative ideas and no increase in performance, whereas gatekeeping was more effective and there was no difference with the West (Ishikawa 2012). Management’s personal objectives vary with the Chinese still focused on traditional group cohesion, harmony and relationship-based trust versus the US focus on personal entitlements and Thais were in between (Adams and Vernon 2008).

Different leadership styles, beyond paternalistic and benevolent to include transactional and transformational, authentic, situational and entrepreneurial are also covered in our collection. The international experts who author the pieces cover a range of leadership and other relevant theories, cases, countries, sectors and methods. Many of their contributions explicitly make the excellent point that studies of leadership need to have greater national, ethnic and gender subtlety and context. Collectively, their insights will help shape global thinking about leadership.

Context

Some may bemoan the ‘fashion-ability’ of the concept of ‘leadership’, arguing that it is theoretically vacuous, ‘old wine in new bottles’, or only clever words for underlying managerial processes. However, we cannot deny that leadership is increasingly discussed globally and is often seen as a key differentiator in business and organizational success. This popularity is due, at least in part, to twin drivers, each of which needs expansion to be viable. First, many focus on the senior leader as the key to organizational success. It is all too easy to focus on the simple exemplar of a leader seen as creating organizational success, rather than the alternative of analysing the complex and messy reality of organizational capability and performance underpinned by an amalgam of factors, including structure, systems and people. Second, many are in search of the universalistic truths called best practices. The fetish of the naive, ceaseless search for the chimera of ‘best practice’ across a range of management areas is limited because they emphasize isolated practices, not integrated solutions, and because they often look backwards to what worked, not forward to what will work. As the oft-used caveat goes: ‘past performance is no guarantee of future results’.

Furthermore, the word ‘leadership’ is prefixed by a range of other terms, including not only authoritarian, but also paternalistic, benevolent, moral as well as now by transactional, transformational, authentic, situational and entrepreneurial. Can we add to this lengthening lexicon with ‘Asian’ as a prefix? We hope that the research reported in our collection goes beyond best practice illusions to rigorous insights on leadership within the Asian context.

Before we start on this discussion, a few quick caveats need to be noted. We will not detail debates about ‘types’ or ‘styles’ of leadership or what it ‘is’ and its contested definitions, or the state of research in the field (for the latter, see the Avolio et al. 2009). Rather, we note the following. For some commentators, ‘management’ is about getting results and doing so efficiently, while ‘leadership’ is about a vision of the future, setting directions and influencing others to pursue common goals and to go beyond mere compliance with routine directives or roles. This perspective emphasizes personal, rather than positional, power. Also, when looking from the other end of the telescope, the organizational commitment (affective, continuance and normative) of ‘followers’ is involved. In simplified terms, the social exchange model (itself based on ideas of trust) is widely used in the leadership area.

With this in mind, we can make the following six points. First, the topic of leadership is certainly popular in many parts of Asia. Leadership and its development is increasingly seen as a differentiator in global competition for some economies when looking to the future. Leadership is also taken as a key aspect of human capital and development (for more, see Rowley and Redding 2012). Singapore is an exemplar case in point. Here the government is focused on greater human capital investment in a variety of practical ways, including its new Human Capital Leadership Institute (HCLI) to help organizations’ leadership development capabilities in Asia. Established in 2010 with the Ministry of Manpower and the Singapore Economic Development Board as partners, the HCLI brings together business, government and academia to develop global leaders with a strong understanding of leading in Asia and Asian leaders with the ability to lead on the global stage. Under the auspices of the Ministry of Manpower, two books have been published about leadership in Asia (Ulrich 2010; Ulrich and Sutton 2011). These books bridge theory and practice and show how public and private sectors invest in leadership to help their organizations succeed.

Second, there is an on-going exploration as to whether leaders are born or breed. At one extreme, some believe leadership development is wasted as ‘leaders are born, not made’, a common assumption and assertion. Thus, for some commentators there are certain innate, inborn qualities or traits – such as initiative, courage, intelligence – which predestine a person to be a leader. There is disagreement about what these exact qualities may be or if there are any ‘eternal verities’, i.e. traits that are consistent over time, context and location. For example, are certain characteristics more or less common in some sectors (say finance versus public) or countries (say US versus Japan)? Also, is leadership variable by level (say CEOs, senior managers, line managers and supervisors), age (of leaders and followers), business strategy (say ‘sweating assets’ versus innovation) and organizational and country development (economic and social) stage? Even for traits-type views, leadership is still influenced by cognitive processes that influence both behaviour and perceptions and in which the role of culture is eminent. In fact, the research suggests that leaders are both born (50% of leadership success comes from innate personal qualities) and breed (50% of leadership comes from learned skills).

Third, we see a focus on both leaders and leadership. ‘Leaders’ is about individual ability and how he or she can be more effective. ‘Leadership’ is about the collective capability of an organization to have leaders throughout the organization. It is not the person as a leader, but the processes that create leadership. There is a natural tendency when looking at leadership to focus on individuals, especially the more visible and highprofile examples, often because they or their organizations are a ‘success’. This is often seen as ‘heroic’, ‘charismatic’ or ‘celebratory’ leadership. This stance reinforces the ‘trait’ view of leadership. Asian examples would include Stan Shih, Acer (Taiwan), Li Ka-Shing, Cheung Kong Holdings (Hong Kong), Kuok Robert Hock Nien, Kuok Group (Malaysia/Singapore) and Terry Gou, Foxxcon (China). While individual leaders matter, leadership matters more because it turns individual abilities into organizational capabilities.

Fourth, many wonder about how to invest in creating ‘effective’ leaders and leadership. If 50% of leadership is learned, then it is helpful to structure that learning. This can be seen as part of the clarion call of the ‘war for talent’ and its implication for the HR planning of top management cadres. This begins with a definition of what makes an effective leader, then proceeds to the practices that instil these competencies including job experiences, training and life experiences.

Fifth, there is interest in what is unique about leadership and how to transfer ideas to and from the East and West. For instance, there are directly opposite ideas about leadership being more (US/UK) or less (Asia) visible, assertive and consultative. Then, there is the issue of the transplantation of ‘indigenous’ leadership, such as Asian leaders in the West or non-Asian leaders in Asia, such as Carlos Ghosn at Nissan.

Sixth, even more confusingly, what we may take as ‘Asian leadership’ can vary across and even within, Asia, such as in the multi-ethnic Malaysia. This also adds another level of complexity and variability given the ‘mix’ of leader–follower dyads. On the one hand, views of Asian leadership may be as autocratic, family-based, dynastic, etc., with leadership in South Korean chaebol and businesses lead by the Chinese diaspora, especially in South East Asia, as examples. Perhaps we can see the influence of ‘Daoism’ here, with its emphasis on the use of power and position in leadership or ‘Legalism’ (of Han Fei) with its emphasis on power. On the other hand, a ‘Confucianism’ view is to lead by virtue and moral example, with broad commitment to harmonious operation and the welfare of society in retaining paternalism and kinship, with a core virtue of benevolence. So, there is the co-existence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, philosophies, that underpin leadership.

While pinning down Asian leadership with any more certainty is difficult, we can note some differences from other areas of the world. For example, Asian leadership occurs in a context based on its own institutions and cultures. This operating context gives rise to the importance of a set of inter-locking features influencing leadership in Asia. These include the following:

• Respect for age and seniority, as in Malaysia.

• More family control and sibling succession issues, as in Hong Kong.

• Less dependence on capital markets for capital (equity and debt), as in Japan.

• Higher freedom of action for executives and boards, as in South Korea.

• Greater role for political connections, as in Indonesia.

Summary

Rather than simply looking at ‘successful’ leaders and analysing their traits, it may be best to view Asian leadership as a system embedded within a larger social organizational system. This includes the quality of dyadic interactions and relationships, collective leadership characterizing group interactions and ultimately organization type and culture characterizing an organizational system. This more functional approach stresses that leadership is essentially an interaction between the leader, the group members, the organization and the contextual situation. So, what ‘good’ leadership ‘is’ varies, certainly between countries – a contingency perspective.

In short, Asian leadership is concerned with relationships that exist between persons in a social situation. A contextual perspective highlights leadership does not occur in a vacuum but in an organizational setting within a particular cultural context. Thus, ‘good’ leaders in one...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by Dr. Richard C. Helfer
• Foreword by Professor Gordon Redding
• Foreword by Professor Geert Hofstede
• 1. Introduction: setting the scene for leadership in Asia Chris Rowley and Dave Ulrich
• 2. Confucian foundations to leadership: a study of Chinese business leaders across Greater China and South-East Asia Paul McDonald
• 3. The leadership philosophy of Han Fei Morgen Witzel
• 4. Entrepreneurial leadership and context in Chinese firms: a tale of two Chinese private enterprises Catherine L. Wang, Ding Ding Tee and Pervaiz K. Ahmed
• 5. Leadership and culture in Asia: the case of Malaysia Uma Jogulu and Lesley Ferkins
• 6. The Japanese global leadership challenge: what it means for the rest of the world J. Stewart Black and Allen J. Morrison
• 7. Using Chinese managerial values to win the war for talent Nandani Lynton and Schon Beechler
• 8. Authentic leadership theory development: theorizing on Chinese philosophy Haina Zhang, André M. Everett, Graham Elkin and Malcolm H. Cone
• 9. The impact of ‘learning’ and ‘leadership’ management styles on organizational outcomes: a study of tyre firms in Thailand Jonathan Michie and Vissanu Zumitzavan
• 10. The influencing mechanisms of paternalistic leadership in Mainland China Min Wu, Xu Huang and Simon C. H. Chan
• 11. The effect of cultural modelling on leadership profiling of the Cambodian manager Christopher Selvarajah, Denny Meyer and Dy Davuth
• 12. Conclusion: lessons learned and insights derived from leadership in Asia Chris Rowley and Dave Ulrich
• Index