In this thesis, we are studying the issue of transformational leadership in Chinese context, which is subjected to social science category. The reason why we concentrate on this research issue is based on the limited available references of Chinese transformational leadership, on our personal interests of transformational leadership and on the rather interesting and mysterious Chinese context covering the influence of globalization, digitalization and so forth.
At the same time, we will focus on two major research questions, what leaders and followers’ expectations are during transformation in Chinese companies and what skills and abilities Chinese transformational leaders need in practice.
Since we have ascertained the research issue and questions, the methodology of grounded theory and relevant literatures of organizational change, full range of leadership model, followership, and skill approach laid the solid foundation for our further data collection and data analysis. And the way of interviewing and questionnaire as specific methods of data collection played a crucial role in gathering empirical data, which gives contributions to theory development for our research.
Through collecting and analyzing data, we constructed our theory of Chinese transformational leadership. For improving transformation performance in Chinese companies, transformational leaders is required to take both leaders and followers’ expectations into consideration and to lead the transformation with effective leadership skills and abilities. In addition, we found that there is a new implication of transformational followership for readers and a comparatively vague concept of trust in transformation process in Chinese companies for further study.
Source: Linnaeus University
Authors: Bi, Shen | Ni, Yingqi