Responsible leadership (RL) has become a buzz word in the current lexicon of business and politics, but there is still limited agreement on the components, scope, and characteristics. The confusion is rooted, in part, in the dominance of normative perspectives that take RL as a universal phenomenon. However, embedded in a specific culture, RL cannot be understood fully without understanding the moral traditions of that culture. In this article, we used a case study method to explore how RL is understood and practiced in China. Taking the role theory perspective, we conducted in-depth interviews with 9 highly regarded responsible executive leaders and 92 stakeholders in and outside of their companies who were well acquainted with the leaders. Our findings reveal that in China, the moral character of leaders guides them to define and take responsibility for themselves, their employees, companies, and external stakeholders. The five dimensions of RL we identified and the relationships among the dimensions include characteristics that reflect Chinese culture, such as strong sentiment for the nation, self-discipline, developing employees philosophically, and ‘jun zi wu ben’ (a gentleman should focus on fundamental matters). We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for RL research and practice.

Whereas the existing literature on the relationship between parental behavior and family business succession mainly focuses on parental behavior in the business domain, we highlight the importance of parental behavior in the family domain. Integrating attachment theory, the family business succession literature, and person-job fit literature, our study proposes a theoretical framework hypothesizing that general self-efficacy and perceived person-job fit mediate the association between perceived parental care (an underrepresented family-domain-specific parental behavior) and next-generation family members’ succession intentions. This framework is tested by data from two surveys and further verified by qualitative interviews of next-generation family members. Multivariate analysis results suggest that next-generation family members’ general self-efficacy and perceived person-job fit played a sequential-mediating role in the relationship between perceived parental care and next-generation family members’ succession intentions. Our interviews not only confirm these results but also reveal new insights, particularly into the specific Chinese context in the study of family business succession.

We compare the influence of entry mode choice on subsidiary performance in two developmentally-differentiated regions of a developing host country. Analysis of 113 subsidiaries located in two provinces of China indicates that wholly owned subsidiaries outperform joint ventures in the developed region, whereas joint ventures outperform wholly owned subsidiaries in the less developed region. However, the smaller performance gap between wholly owned subsidiaries and joint ventures in the developed region indicates that the magnitude of influence of entry mode choices on performance varies across subnational regions. Firms must therefore be more discriminating in formulating entry strategies to regionally heterogeneous countries.

Business leaders constitute a powerful driving force for the miraculous growth of the Chinese economy in the past few decades. However, scholars have not developed theories accounting for the unique leadership phenomenon in the Chinese context, characterized by high uncertainty, intense market competition, and constant changes in government regulations and policies. This special issue aims at offering insights regarding business leadership in China. In this paper, we first introduce the three streams of Chinese leadership research, varying in the degree of Chinese context being considered in theory development. We then discuss how Chinese leadership has co-evolved with the transformation of firms and the institutional environment in China. The new values of young employees, born after 1980, are driving the need for leaders to adjust their leadership practices once again. After that, we present a summary of the four papers in this special issue, and the insights they provide to our understanding of leadership and its effectiveness in the Chinese context. Finally, we suggest future research directions for Chinese leadership research.

In this study, we develop a context-emic model to evaluate articles which use the Chinese context for their theoretical contributions to management and organization research. We apply the model to 259 articles published in six leading general management and organization journals between 1981 and 2010 and 43 articles from Management and Organization Review (MOR) from its launch in 2005 to 2010. We found ten articles in the six leading journals and four articles in MOR to have some degree of Chinese contextualization in their concepts or constructs (what), their relationships (how), and tlie logics underlying the relationships (why). In particular, we discovered only three new concepts (market transition, network capitalism, and guanxi), and some reference to Confucianism and its related concepts. As expected, MOR articles have a higher level of Chinese contextualization than articles in the top six journals. Using the Colquitt and Zapata-Phelan theory-building-testing taxonomy, we found Chinese-context research to have contributed to both theory-building and theory-testing over time. We also found that empirical articles with a higher level of Chinese contextualization garner more citations. Finally, we discuss the implications of the study's results for future contextualization research related to China.

The economic and market reforms in China have given rise to firms with three distinct types of ownership: state-owned enterprises, private domestic enterprises, and foreign-invested firms. The three studies reported in this paper addressed the questions of whether organizational culture varies among firms with different ownership structures and whether it relates to firm performance or employee attitudes as it has been observed in US firms. The first study employed an inductive approach to identify culture dimensions and found five common dimensions across these different types of firms. In the second study, we derived an empirical taxonomy of four organizational culture types involving different configurations of the five organizational culture dimensions, and found a systematic relationship between these culture types and a measure of perceived firm performance. The third study confirmed the relationship between organizational culture types and middle manager attitudes. Suggestions are offered for future research building on the organizational culture dimensions and culture types introduced in these studies.

This article presents a qualitative study of the subjective experiences of 24 Chinese adolescents and young women who have been suffering from anorexia nervosa and who have received family treatment from a university-based family treatment centre in Hong Kong. In-depth post-treatment interviews were conducted and have been transcribed and thematised using content analysis. The narratives that have emerged have facilitated hearing the clients' and their family members' voices, especially in the areas of (a) perceived concepts of family therapy, (b) the perceived therapeutic relationship and its linkage to positive change, (c) perceived intervention strategies as employed in family treatment, and (d) the participants' own role in problem-solving. The study has enabled the author to refine the family treatment model, which has been adapted from the Micucci's (1998) model, with additional components introduced by the author to enhance family treatment in a Chinese context.