Chinese traditions and Western theories: influences on business leaders in China

Abstract

T his chapter concerns contemporary Chinese business leaders' management philosophies and the sources of these philosophies. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with thirty-five successful business leaders from enterprises in China. Content-analyzing the interviews, we identified seven management philosophies held by these business leaders: sincerity is essential; pursuit of excellence; social responsibility; harmony is precious; the Golden Mean (acting in the middle way); specialization; and scientific management. We found that both Chinese cultural traditions and Western management theories influence Chinese business leaders' management philosophies and practices. While the Western management theories have great impact on their task-related operations, Chinese culture has a significant influence on their people management practices. These findings suggest that modern business administration education should balance Western theories and Chinese philosophies and integrate the wisdoms from the two streams. Inroduction The term “management philosophy” has appeared frequently in Chinese popular mass media and Chinese business leaders' speeches. In a database named Chinainfobank, we searched for articles containing “guan li zhe xue [management philosophy]” in newspapers in China. We found 44 articles published in the period 1990–1999, 198 in 2000–2002, and 165 in 2003–2005. Then we searched for “guan li li nian [management ideas]” in the same database and found a huge number of articles: 164 published in 1990–1999, 2595 in 2000–2002, and 4904 in 2003–2005.