Leadership Orientation of Chinese Professionals in the Automotive Industry: Comparing their Task and Relationship Tendencies

Managers usually balance their approach to task management with a focus on developing healthy relationships with employees, customers, and vendors. To study the management approach of automotive industry managers in China, this paper focused on comparing the leadership orientation of respondents and compared it with Americans. It appears that these Chinese respondents from the automotive industry have significantly higher scores on the relationship-orientation than task-orientation. Similarly, the female respondents in China had similar scores as their male colleagues. The responses of these 200 Chinese respondents from the automotive industry were compared with 484 Americans from the general population, demonstrating significantly higher scores for the Chinese on both orientations. It appears that being socialized in a collectivistic and high content culture that practices Confucius principles can lead to higher focus on relationship and task orientations. In the last section, practical application and implications for future research are explored.