The rapid development of global businesses has prompted ever greater Westernization in cross business cultures among Chinese firms. This study contributes to Chinese management by examining whether participative type leadership plays a mediating role to adjust the undesired paired impacts of manager's power-distance leading and followers' values of conformity on fostering workers innovative values. Four types of firms differing in ownership -- government-owned enterprises (GOEs), foreign-controlled businesses (FCBs), and private-owned enterprises (POEs) owned respectively by Taiwanese (TW) and Shandongese (SD), across two business clusters in Shanghai and Qindau China, were sampled to represent level of Westernization. The findings reveal supports for the hypothesized relationships between firm-ownership and work-related values accounted for this Westernization connection: The FCBs perceive strongest all the innovative type values in conflict tolerance, values performance, autonomy, and risk-taking, while the GOEs perceive strongest the traditional Chinese respect and conformity values, and power-distance leadership of managers, and the two POEs fall somewhere in between. Additional analysis suggests that leadership style of immediate managers mediates these connections, such that their participative leadership behavior reduces the negative impacts of the pair values of power-distance leading and followers' conformity values across the four types of ownership firms. The value of respect, though also a Chinese tradition, appears to complement the impacts. We conclude that an adjustment of manager's leadership behavior from a power- distance to a participative style may help reduce the negative impacts of old values on employees.