Volume 3, No. I June 2000

Power and Relationship: Two Elements of the Chinese/Western Divide

by
Michael Miles
Concordia University, Canada

The day on which Zhang Wei Gou met John Redmann was fateful in many ways. Zhang had worked for many years at a small paper factory in Shanxie province. He had a good reputation as a manager of people but the State-owned factory in which he worked was small and very inefficient. Production quality was low, processes were not well thought out and the workers in general were not much interested in improving things. Zhang was frustrated both with his leaders' inability to improve conditions at the factory and with his own inability to change things despite his good relations with the workers. He decided in the summer of 1996 to xiahie (to take a job in the private sector). He quickly found a supervisory job in a China-Canadian joint venture in the nearby city of Xian.

On his second day at the plant he was introduced to his new Western boss, John Redmann. John was from Canada and had been in China for six months. He had worked in Canada for the petro-chemical company for over ten years and had arrived in China very excited to have the opportunity to work in this new environment.

He wasn't excited any more.

In fact, he was very frustrated with what appeared to be the lack of interest among his Chinese workers and managers to do quality work. His initial brief meeting with Zhang began with a discussion of Zhang's new duties in his role as supervisor of Line #3. In the discussion, John described the problems they were having with low output of this particular line and explained that he expected Zhang to push for significant improvements to the line. He mentioned the high salaries and benefits that the workers were receiving for their time and said that, in return for these rewards, he expected good performance from them. "As a supervisor and an employee of the company, Zhang, you owe this company high performance in return for your salary. This is true for everyone in the plant, including myself. I hope that we will be able to work together well, and I need you to understand that we will all be under pressure for high production. I expect you to pass this message on to your employees and to bring it about as their supervisor."

Zhang immediately began to dislike John. By the end of the next 2 months, even though Zhang tried to push his employees to improve things on the line, production was still not significantly better and John began to dislike Zhang. And the workers disliked them both.

China's move from a centralized to market driven economy has created casualties on both sides of the Chinese/foreign management boundary. On the Chinese side, the market economy requires higher levels of output, higher levels of quality, and an increased predictability of production that is not traditional for the majority of existing enterprises in China (Child, 1994). This is true especially, but not exclusively, for the category of Chinese business organization called State Owned Enterprises (SOE's), many of which are candidates for joint venture activity under current Chinese government policy. Regardless of the category of production facility under examination, Chinese managers are finding the challenge to improve productivity difficult within the strictures of traditional methods of motivation and human resource management practice. In order to achieve new production and quality targets, Chinese managers are having to rethink "business as usual" approaches to management.

The problem with the shift in management approach is that the underlying premises of many of the foreign organizational methods being imported along with foreign financing require a reframing of core Chinese management concepts and practices. In particular, findings of the research carried out in this study indicate that fundamental differences in the conception of interpersonal power, including its ties to the concept of relationship, may be at the heart of many Chinese/foreign managerial difficulties (Miles, 1999). The central importance of the personal relationship between supervisor and employee represents a factor in employee motivation in China that Western motivation theories and managerial practice do not explicitly recognize. The shift in China from a system of management based on premises of requisite formal egalitarianism, collectivism, and guanxi (Blackman, 1997) to one of variable individual reward based on goal achievement represents a significant change in both attitude and practice. Locked in a traditional system of symbiotic mutual benefit and support, managers and employees in many Chinese enterprises are resisting movement in the direction of new management practice, regardless of the current state of financial exigency in the economy and even in their own individual enterprises.

On the other side of this cross-cultural coin is the expatriate manager. Such individuals, chosen generally for their technical and managerial competence in a non-Chinese environment, are tasked by their companies to develop stable production facilities and to maintain high product standards. Frequently such managers expect that the significant difference in compensation, benefits, and training between foreign-dominated and local enterprises will motivate excellence in performance (Davidson, 1987). Results to date indicate that such an equation is both na•ve and inappropriate (Ferguson, 1993). In the face of lower than expected profitability and the stress of high expectations on both sides of the Chinese and foreign ownership team, expatriate managers, regardless of briefings and cross-cultural training, tend to fall back on what they know has worked in the past (their experience) and what they have been taught will work by others (their training). The limitations of both these sources of wisdom as primary touchstones for guidance in mainland China is legendary in the literature (Baird, 1990; Blackman, 1997; Joy, 1989; Lockett, 1988). Foreign managers readily admit that their initial expectations for organizational performance have not been met and that Western "traditional" motivation and organization change management methods have been largely unsuccessful in achieving desired performance goals (Baird, 1990).

In the face of the limited effectiveness of Western management approaches in motivating higher levels of performance, this study attempts to identify elements of managerial thinking that explain the potential disconnects between effective Chinese organizational leadership and management practices and Western management theory. Results of the study highlight the difference between Chinese and Western managers in the conceptualization and use of power as a potential factor in the relatively less effective impact of Western management practice in a Chinese organizational setting. Power dynamics become particularly significant in the development and workings of "relationship" as a key factor in the Chinese work environment.

Research Approach

The research approach of this study combines a primarily qualitative methodology based on ethnographic tradition with an attempt to establish, through quantitative methods, a relative hierarchy of valued behaviors related to Chinese leadership practice. The overall approach represents a variation on the methodology utilized by Bond and his team of Chinese research collaborators (The Chinese Connection, 1987) in an innovative analysis of Chinese values. In their study, Bond's research team requested Chinese managers and academics to nominate "significant Chinese values" with no a priori reference to Western (or other) values profiles. The resultant responses represented a concise set of values pertinent to Chinese culture and behavior.

The significance of this approach, and that of the current study, is that it attempts to isolate the constructs being studied values in general in the first study and valued behaviors related to leadership in this study from any culturally foreign organizing model or framework. The participants in Bond's study and in the study that is the subject of this paper responded to a simple focusing question without reference to any context other than their own Chinese cultural organizing framework. The resultant findings provide a unique and useful set of insights into the Chinese conceptualization of values in Bond's study and leadership in the case of this study.

The focus of the research underlying this paper was the development of a representational "mental model" of effective management practice as used on a daily basis by Chinese managers. Senge describes mental models as "both semipermanent tacit Ômaps' of the world which people hold in their long-term memory, and short term perceptions which people build up as part of their everyday reasoning processes." (1994:237) The specific model of Chinese management practice which this study pursued outlines individual behaviors which form the base to effective organizational management from the perspective of the Chinese respondents in the study. Organizational managers who participated in the study were asked to write stories or critical incidents which describe behavior consistent with their personal conception of "good leadership." They were instructed to draw such incidents from any time in their life experience, starting as early as they could remember in their lives and describing the behaviors of leaders whom they have experienced up to and including the present day. Participants were requested to write this in the form of a story of an incident or series of incidents that were significant in the development of their personal picture of an effective manager in behavioral terms. The written stories were translated, and their content analyzed with the intent of identifying themes related to effective management in a Chinese context. The results of the analysis were presented to groups of management trainees of the same level from the same Chinese institute as those managers who had participated in the original data gathering exercise. This procedure was used as a method to verify accuracy of translation and analysis and to further extend the identification of additional categories of themes and specific leadership behaviors.

The product of the analysis is a descriptive overview of themes and related behaviors that the study participants saw as operationally significant in relation to management effectiveness in the context of today's China (for a review of the full range of themes and behaviors identified in the study see Miles, 1999). The contrast of the thematic overview developed by this study with patterns outlining the experience and implicit values of expatriate Joint Venture managers in China in the literature provides an interesting and instructive picture explaining many of the conflicts which both sides of cross-cultural management ventures in China alternately find funny and abhor.

The research approach based in the use of stories and description of critical incidents as receptacles of meaning is well established in both the practice and literature of ethnography. Martin (1982) represents an excellent example of this approach. Schank also promotes the use of stories as an appropriate approach to increase cross-cultural understanding. His position is that "...coping with the modern world means knowing the stories of the cultures in which you operate...Understanding a culture, then, in the sense of being able to operate easily in it, means knowing the culture's stories." (1990:206) Respondents in this study were asked specifically to recount stories which detailed aspects of leadership and management behavior which individuals had demonstrated to them and which had, to some extent, influenced their personal visions of effective management in the workplace. Whether these managers currently emulated these behaviors was not the focus of the research. The significance of the content of the particular stories captured derive from the fact that, given the broad range of behaviors which the respondents had experienced and observed over their lifetimes, when given an opportunity to nominate specific individuals and behaviors related to leadership, the respondents spontaneously chose to recount the recorded specific examples which they saw as critical to their conception of effective management practice. It is these recalled incidents of management behavior which form the core of this study's data base for analysis and which led, finally, to the identification of the conceptions of power and assumptions related to motivation that this article proposes as operationally significant in a Chinese setting.

Description of the Study Participant Sample Group

All participants in the study were senior management trainees in management development programs sponsored by the Beijing Petroleum Manager's Training Institute (BPMTI). This facility is a senior management training Institute fully funded by the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) in China. Study participants were drawn from three separate sessions sponsored by the Institute over the period November 1995 to July, 1997. The first group of executives was participating in a general management development program for Operations Vice-Presidents in Chinese oil refineries and petrochemical facilities. The second group was enrolled in a special development program for potential overseas managers who would be placed in management roles in China's expanding foreign-based oil facilities. This latter group had relatively extensive exposure to foreign managers on a project basis and freely identified conflicting and contrasting value and behavioral differences between themselves and their foreign counterparts. The third group was participating in a general management development program for Communist Party Secretaries of CNPC refinery and production facilities.

The three groups included a total of 112 potential participants. All members of each of the three courses were invited to participate in the study and informed that participation was voluntary. They were given the opportunity to either take part in a focus group led by the researcher and his interpreter or to write stories and hand them in to the researcher at subsequent sessions of their training program. This was facilitated by the fact that one of the researchers (Wang Dawei) was a full time Faculty member of the Institute and the second (Michael Miles) was delivering classes for all of the participants and had ready access to them during their session meeting times. Of the total potential group of respondents, 15 participated in focus groups and 30 participated by turning in written stories. Demographics of the final study participant group are outlined in Table 1.

Study Findings

Traditions of Leadership Behavior: some differences in enactment

A key issue faced by Western managers on assignment to Chinese joint ventures (and increasingly, Western-owned businesses in China) is the problem of how to effectively manage a workforce of Chinese employees across a clear and undeniable culture barrier. One key issue in this dilemma that has been identified in the literature (Baird, 1990) is the problem with both "side's" experience is that it is driven by their relative traditions of leadership. As both the Chinese and foreign managers are pushed to move away from respective traditions of management in their efforts to deal with global production demands, separately and collectively they feel rising discomfort with "new ways".

Both sides feel uncomfortable with fully divestingthemselves of "what they know will work" to explore qualitatively new approaches to the management of what is truly a unique problem for all concerned the management of a global enterprise in a Chinese environment. On days when things don't go particularly well, both sides fall back on what have been, in their experience, effective leadership strategies. Chinese managers engage in processes based in "relationship" to inspire (or coerce) requisite production improvements. Western managers use a more "rational" approach, exhorting productivity increases through the supposed motivational qualities of "salary and benefit differentials" or the organizational magic of "technology fixes". In the midst of the lack of firm direction typical of such organizational change processes, the Chinese employees responsible for daily production quotas and productivity improvement are keenly aware of the discomfort and uncertainty of their managers, both Chinese and Western. As one Chinese worker explained: "We are like Sony Walkmen we have very good antennae that receive signals from our managers". Employee awareness of the dynamics of the shift, regardless of the lack of clarity concerning its specifics, causes similar feelings of disquiet in their ranks. The results of such pervasive uncertainty at all levels of the organizational hierarchy increase both the risk of failure and the complexity of the overall leadership task on the part of both Chinese and Western management alike.

The research related to this study, combined with extensive reviews of the literature on Chinese Joint Venture management, have identified two core areas where conflicts of leadership tradition impact in a significant manner on management practice in Chinese Joint Venture organizations. These include basic conceptions of power and the dynamics of motivation.

"Power Over" vs. "Power With"

A major dilemma of management in China is the issue of acquiring, maintaining, and using power to achieve organizational ends. China has a well developed literature, driven by Confician philosophy, which speaks eloquently about five primary levels of power relationships. These are defined as the relationship between father and son, between immediate family members, between relatives, between coworkers, and between friends and acquaintences (Blackmann, 1997). The contrast between the focus on relationship as the primary defining parameter of power in China and those referenced by Western managers represents an important clue related to the heart of potential cross cultural management issues.

When asked about potential sources of power in an organizational context, Western managers tend to identify five key sources (French, 1959). Most frequently mentioned is ability to reward or alternatively punish an employee. This response speaks directly to the western belief that employees are rational human beings who respond to a situation by judging the relative benefits of one path of action over another. The rational belief system holds that, if the benefits (or the punishments) are sufficient, the employee will do what the manager directs since he or she is the representative of the "Company". Other forms of power mentioned by foreign managers in China include the legitimate power of position ("you should do this because I am the manager and I have the right to tell you what to do"), the power of expertise or knowledge ("you should do this because I have a lot of experience and know the right way to do these things'), and the power of charisma ("you should do this because you are impressed with who I am as a person and I am asking you to do this"). The literature indicates that various western traditions tends to emphasize differing sources of power. The French and British, for example, emphasize the power of position in legitimizing demands on employees whereas the Americans tend to focus more frequently on the power of expertise or knowledge (Gannon, 1994). Regardless of differences across western cultures, however, there is agreement among managers that some combination of these five types of power, initially identified by French and Raven (French, 1968), represent the most frequently used means of influencing others in the traditional Western organizational setting.

The operating framework of the above five forms of power is key to understanding the cultural difference which causes difficulty when they are applied directly into a traditional Chinese operating environment. All of these forms of power represent a frame of mind that implies a hierarchy of worth of the individuals in the organizational setting. For example, reward and punishment power imply that the person who has the power to reward or to punish is somehow "better than" the person who will receive the reward or punishment. Position power represents a direct organizational statement: "I am the boss and you are the employee. Because my position is higher than yours in the organization, you should do what I ask of you." Expertise and knowledge imply more education or experience as the factors which make one person's opinion more "valuable" than the other's. Although charismatic power can exist in a relationship between people who are at the same level, it still implies that one person "looks up to" the other for some reason. All of these forms of power represent a "power over" view of the world, implying that one of the people in the relationship is somehow better than the other.

The above description contrasts significantly with Chinese managers' perceptions of effective forms of power in a working environment. While Chinese managers agree that reward, punishment, position and expertise can be useful forms of power to motivate workers to follow the leader's direction, they focus strongly on charismatic power as the base to effective management. More directly, they focus on relationship between the manager and worker as the key to any effective base of power. In order to understand this difference it is important to have some appreciation of recent Chinese history and economic theory.

Since the inception of communism and the integration of socialism into the Chinese experience, many aspects of Chinese life are driven by the deeply held belief that there exists a basic equality among people. This is true even though there is a current shift away from strict Chinese socialism toward a more market-oriented approach to economic reality. The powerful affect of the communist experience on the current cadre of Chinese workers and managers has resulted in a current reality that, where advantages of organizational position (titles and the ability to reward or punish) or knowledge and expertise (due to some educational advantage) exist, the individual who possesses these advantages becomes suspect and is frequently ostracized as not being one of the community. The strong socialist base of belief of the vast majority of the Chinese population at all levels of society (including those attracted to xiahie [to "go to the sea"] to work in joint ventures as both managers and workers) brings with it a strong aversion to use a traditional western "power over" framework of authority. In its absence, Chinese managers prefer to use the power of relationship between "informal equals" to motivate worker productivity, regardless of the other power bases that are operating at the same time (such as position, reward, or expertise).

This alternate framework represents a "power with" approach to authority. It is characterized by attention to establishing and maintaining effective personal relationships between manager and subordinate. Mutual respect is the core of the relationship and represents the essential ingredient that motivates a worker to carry out the directives of the manager. In the best of all worlds in China, workers and manager mutually agree that production should increase or quality should improve and the worker implements any changes suggested by the manager based first on his or her respect for the manager and only secondly for considerations of the other power bases which accrue to the manager's position (such as rewards or punishment). Without the relationship of mutually inclusive respect, the effectiveness of the manager's alternate power sources become tenuous at best because he or she will lose the respect and support of the rest of the workers if they are applied in disrespectful ways. In response to a question related to the use of managerial power in his company, Po Chung, founder of DHL International summarized this position in clear and concise terms: "We expect loyalty and hard work. In return, we give personal loyalty, commitment, care and respect." It appears that only when the framework of "power with" is used as the guiding approach is managerial authority fully realized in the Chinese working environment.

Motivation in China - the Continuing Theme of Relationship

One of the core management dilemmas in both the Chinese and the Western workplace is how to motivate workers to do what the organization needs to have done in sufficient quantity and with sufficient quality to satisfy consumer needs. Much of the time managers spend on "human resource" issues in their organizations focuses on this topic, since a highly motivated workforce can make the difference between success or failure of the enterprise, both from the perspective of product output and from that of reputation as a "high quality" employer.

In the West, motivation is looked at from at least three different perspectives:

¥ how to arouse a person's interest in doing something;

¥ how to direct their efforts once aroused so that they will do precisely what the manager wants them to do;

¥ how to maintain their interest and effort in carrying out their work over the longer term.

Discussions with Chinese managers indicate that similar dilemmas exist in today's Chinese organizational environment. Manager's interviewed, however, indicate that they believe there is a significant difference which exists between the West and China in that there appears to be wider flexibility and availability of benefits to motivate behavior in the West. Experience in Chinese-Western joint ventures, however, where broader benefit packages are available within a Chinese context show that, regardless of the expanded benefit packages, the same motivation issues continue to arise. It would appear that motivation is tied to more than benefits.

One branch of Western research began examining the relationship of employee motivation to the benefits provided by their organization. The findings of this research, undertaken initially by Victor Vroom (1964), focused on the relationship of three core factors which appear to determine whether a person will be motivated at work. Those factors include:

1) The strength of the belief of the worker that he/she can successfully do the work.

If the worker feels that he or she has the skills, knowledge, appropriate support systems in the organization, and sufficient tools to do the job, they will feel the beginning of motivation to do the work. If they feel that it is impossible for them to do the work due to lack of skill or knowledge on their part or as a result of other organizational factors, their motivation will be low.

2) The strength of the belief of the worker that their manager will be able or willing to provide them with the rewards or benefits which have been promised to them if they do successfully carry out their work.

In some situations, workers have been promised rewards or special benefits if they work hard or achieve specific production targets. Where managers promise such rewards and do not follow through with them when production targets have been met, workers begin not to trust them. In such situations, worker motivation to carry out the task remains low, because they lack trust in their manager in relation to promised rewards or special benefits. On the other hand, if managers do deliver the promised rewards, especially if it is clear that the manager had to fight to get those rewards for his employees, worker motivation (and respect for the manager) goes up.

3) The desirability of the rewards or benefits being promised.

If the organization promises rewards that are highly desirable to the workers (and the other two conditions outlined above are positive) then workers will be more motivated to carry out the work. If, on the other hand, the organization provides rewards or benefits that are less attractive to its workers, individual workers may be less motivated to achieve those rewards - and their work performance will suffer. An example of this could be a Company which decided to reward an employee with extra time off from his or her job for special performance. If the employee was trying to make more money to buy a house, extra time off would not be seen as a useful reward. If the Company were to promise this employee extra salary for exceptional performance, the employee might be much more motivated work harder for this reward.

There clearly is a relationship between these three factors (see Figure 1). In early Western management practice, much attention was focused on rewards and benefits because this area was seen as the key motivating factor. More modern management recognizes that all three factors are crucial to a fully motivated employee in a western organization.

When this approach to modern motivation was discussed with Chinese managers, considerable focus was initially put on the rewards and benefits factor as key to motivating employees. Further discussion, however, indicated that there was a fourth factor which might be considered more basic to motivating behavior: the quality of the relationship between the manager and the employee. Managers indicated that, even if the employee believed that they could do what was being requested (Factor 1), the manager had done what he said he would do in the past, (Factor 2) and the reward being offered was seen as valuable (Factor 3), the employee might still not exert extra effort. The determining factor in a Chinese context was the quality of the relationship between the individual employee and his or her supervisor. In the words of one manager from Shanxie province: " Even though I don't want to do this particular job, I cannot refuse because I like the person who has asked me to do it. This is THE most important factor in motivating my choice."

The concept of "like" as described above extends beyond the bounds of trusting the manager to deliver promised rewards. It enters the personal realm, a qualitatively different plane of relationship. According to the managers surveyed, this additional realm represents the true managerial base of motivation in a Chinese context. The other factors as noted in the western model come in to play only after a positive level of relationship has been established. In some cases noted by respondents, even though promised rewards were clearly of interest to the workers and they had the ability to carry out the requested work, they still refused to perform as requested. When queried as to their resistance, they indicated that they did not feel close to the manager who had requested the changes and had no "desire" to do the work. Based on this information, it would appear that the model of effective motivation within Chinese organizations would resemble that outlined in Figure 2.

Summary and Conclusions

There are several implications for both Chinese and Western managers related to the view of reality in Chinese organizations as described in this study. First and most importantly, it is essential that Western managers understand that their ownership of the factory (with associated power to make decisions related to wages and benefits) does not give them effective authority or power in the eyes of many Chinese managers or workers. In fact, such "legitimate" forms of power make many Chinese employees suspicious of superiors, especially if the managers act as if they are somehow better than the workers. In China, it is not effective in the long term to use the framework of "power over" or its various power mechanisms as the main base for motivating behavior in the workplace.

Secondly, the use of high salaries and benefits for employees as a way of motivating increased effort is not effective without a strong and respectful personal relationship between the workers and the managers concerned. This is true for both Western and Chinese managers and between Western managers and their Chinese supervisors and subordinate managers. The key task of Western managers is to build and maintain effective personal relationships with their direct reports and to facilitate efforts of their direct reports to do the same with their employees. The key task for the Chinese manager is to explain issues to their Western counterparts in terms of the implications for relationship as well as the substance of the issue at hand. In some cases this will require Western managers (who in theory have more "power over" bases) to make or defer decisions is ways that allow their subordinates to gain face, potentially to the short-term detriment to the image of the Western manager. If this is done strategically, however, and by mutual agreement between the manager and his or her subordinates, both sides increase the degree of respect and trust that exist between them. The resultant positive impact on production often appears as an unmanaged byproduct of "the way we do business here."

Implications of the reframing of motivation theory strike at one of the very basic principles of western management theory - the depersonalization of work into a series of roles and responsibilities. In the West we have struggled hard over the last several decades to structure work in ways that focus less on the person and more on the accurate definition of job responsibilities, skill profiles and reward structures. While these are important to some extent in China since they assist in clarifying the flow of work, they are essentially secondary to the personal relationship which the manager has with each of his workers. Western managers who are assigned to China (and their modern Chinese counterparts who have been promoted to management positions in joint-venture companies) might well consider paying less attention to the formal organization chart and more attention to the quality of relationship that they have with their counterparts and employees. Western managers in China might also increase the amount of attention they pay to monitoring the "emotional climate" of their organization as a key management indicator of the quality of "relationship" between the managers, supervisors and employees in their facility. Although such data can be gathered through structured processes such as focus groups, questionnaires, and unobtrusive observation, Chinese managers interviewed for this study indicate that approaches involving more personal interaction directly between supervisor and employee generate higher quality and more reliable information. This is especially true in circumstances where natural inhibitions to open exchange of information have been lowered. Examples of opportunities for such exchanges included extended travel away from home where uninterrupted opportunities exist for extended informal conversation or occasions where alcohol consumption leads to more open discussion of more sensitive topics.

Finally, both Chinese and Western managers need to remember that relationships are human inventions which take time and effort to develop. The smart managers on both sides will structure opportunities of a personal and social nature to expand their relationship and treat the tests and difficulties that naturally occur through the process of carrying out daily work not as challenges but rather as opportunities to extend the relationship between them into new arenas. As a means to achieving this end, both Chinese and Western managers might consider structuring Company-sanctioned opportunities to build relationship at all levels of the organization. Leading edge corporations in China currently model this behavior by providing sports facilities and structured activities that encourage positive interaction among employees without distinction of rank or seniority. Such "investments" speak well of the awareness of senior managers of these companies of the importance of relationship to both short and long term success.

References

Baird, I.S., Lyles, M.A. and Wharton, R. (1990). Attitudinal differences between American and Chinese managers regarding joint venture management. Management International Review, 30, 53-68.

Blackman, Carolyn (1997). Negotiating China: case studies and strategies. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin.

Child, John (1994). Management in China during the reform. London: Cambridge University Press.

Chinese Connection, The. (1987). Chinese values and the search for culture-free dimensions of culture. Journal of Cross-cultural Psychology, 18, 143-164.

Davidson, W.H. (1987). Creating and managing joint ventures in China. California Management Review, 29, 77-94.

Ferguson, T. C. (1993). Joint ventures in China: when West meets East and encounters the great wall of differing management thought. Journal of Management Inquiry, 2, 201-204.

French, J.R.P. and Raven, B. (1959). The bases of social power. In D. Cartwright, (ed.) Studies in social power, Ann Arbor Michigan: Institute for Social Research, 150-167.

Joy, Robert O. (1989). Cultural and procedural differences the influence business strategies and operations in the People's Republic of China. SAM Advanced Management Journal. Summer. 29-33.

Lockett, M. (1988). Culture and Problems of Chinese Management. Organization Studies. 4, 475-492.

Martin, J. (1982). Stores and scripts in organizational settings. In A. Hastorf and Isen, A. (eds) Cognitive social psychology. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Miles, M. (1999). Leadership in the land of the dragon. The Fielding Institute: Doctoral Dissertation.

(1997). Managing global virtual teams: a Canadian-Chinese case study in Innovations in team Organization and management. Montreal: Federated press.

Schank, R.C. (1990). Tell me a story: narrative and intelligence. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Senge, P. M. (1990). The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization. New York: Doubleday.

Vroom, Victor (1964). Work and motivation. New York: Wiley.