Shades of paternalistic leadership across cultures

Angels and devils?: How do benevolent and authoritarian leaders differ in shaping ethical climate via justice perceptions across cultures?

“…Our mediation findings for authoritarian leadership show that while these leaders negatively affect ethical climate via procedural justice in Turkey and via interactional justice in the United States, they do not have any significant negative effects on ethical climate either via interactional or procedural justice in Taiwan. These findings for Turkey imply that PL is a double‐edged sword for Turkish managers, who were found to exercise the highest authoritarian behaviors among the three cultural settings (Mansur et al, ). That is, in the Turkish context, since authoritarian leadership is a strongly endorsed leadership style, even more so than benevolence, PL may result in negative consequences at the workplace by deteriorating perceptions of both the fairness of the system and the ethical climate.…”

“…We deliberately chose these three national cultures since Taiwan and Turkey are high on both collectivism (individualism score is 17 for Taiwan and 37 for Turkey) and power distance (58 for Taiwan and 66 for Turkey), whereas the United States is very high on individualism (91), but low on power distance (40) (Hofstede, ). Similarly, in terms of PL dimensions, Mansur et al () categorized Taiwan and Turkey as similar to each other representing high authority and high benevolence, while they considered the United States as low in authority and mediocre in benevolence.…”

“…In these cultures, subordinates willingly accept the leader's authority since the leader's status is ascribed by the virtue of his/her position, age, and experience (Aycan, ). On the contrary, in low power distance cultures, subordinates do not tolerate authority, since they view themselves as equals of their leaders and want to exercise autonomy (Mansur et al, ). Hence, we argue that leaders who treat employees with rudeness and insensitivity will be seen as more unfair in the United States than in Turkey and Taiwan.…”

“…Accordingly, the two major aspects of PL are control (i.e., authoritarianism) and care (i.e., benevolence). While authoritarian leadership (dark side of PL) includes exercising power, and control over subordinates, benevolent dimension (bright side of PL) includes showing individualized and holistic concern for subordinates' professional and personal welfare (Mansur et al, 2017). Cheng et al (2000) introduced moral leadership as a third dimension of PL, but it is peculiar to Asian contexts, and its universality and generalizability is unclear (Aycan, 2006;Hiller et al, 2019;Pellegrini & Scandura, 2008).…”

“…Similarly, Pellegrini, Scandura, and Jayaraman (2010) showed that paternalism may have some positive effects in the United States. Hence, it is obvious that PL is a leadership style that should be examined with the consideration of cultural context (Mansur, Sobral, & Goldszmidt, 2017).…”