Top2.2 Challenges In This Research
The research on the correlations between values orientations and leadership styles is very challenging. Previous researches mainly focus on the separated topics on either values systems or leadership styles. However, there is seldom research which entwines them both together and sees it from comprehensive perspective. The most obvious reason might be that values system or cultural research is rather abstract and qualitative and the same is true of the researches on leadership styles as there is not a one-for-all model of leadership style to follow and it is hard for anyone to say one leadership style is better than the others.
As regarding the cultures and values research, the most famous giants like M. H. Bond, Schwartz, Hofstede and others have in their research eyed on the western context. Although M. H. Bond has developed a Chinese values survey, which is mainly derived from the ideas of Confucius thoughts (BVS), it is not as popular as that developed by Schwartz (SVS). Even when the author of this research has in person had a long talk and profound discussion with M. H. Bond, he finally suggested that the author should adopt SVS (Schwartz values survey as the instrument), which again indicates the importance and significance of this research as this research has been conducted for over two years to have obtained 778 samples from the distributed 1000 questionnaires. The research findings, to some extent may fill the gap of the lack of research on Chinese values and the leadership styles of Chinese business leaders.
To speak from the research methodologies, in the past decade, SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) has become very hot in empirical research field. Even some scholars have summarized hundreds of papers from top tier journals to testify that SEM has been widely used in empirical research and there is a tendency of still roaring up in the research field. The author of this paper has been also intending to follow the trend, but the preliminary results obtained from SEM have shown that the testing results are not very attractive as against the author’s expectations. Therefore, the author has to abandon SEM as the research methodology but still have puzzlement in mind. With this big puzzlement, the author has been to HK again to seek answers from one of the greatest giants in culture and leadership style research---M. H. Bond. As he suggested that it doesn’t mean that every popular tool is good and appropriate in any research. As the most prominent feature of SEM is to find the correlations between multiple factors, it seems that SEM should be very suitable in this research. Actually, values survey and leadership styles survey to a large extent are very abstract and it is hard to measure the exact correlations between values and leadership styles, even though both of the questionnaires have themselves in 9 and 5 Likert scales respectively. Since the items of the surveys can not be absolutely measured, the correlations between cultural value factors and leadership styles can not be in a linear relation. Being a famous guru in this research, seldom of his (M. H. Bond) papers have adopted SEM as the research methodology, though most of his papers have been released in top-tier journals. The failure in adopting SEM methodology might be resulting in the nature of mediocre of Chinese culture and also might be because the questionnaires adopted in this research are not very suitable to people in Chinese culture.