Lecture 2 - Leadership and Management

China Day 6 (Tianjin)

Today we learned about the differences between Leadership and Management and how cultural differences can effect a companies success in a given country depending on how they approach management and leadership. This lecture was taught by Dr. Zhao Wei. I really liked this professors body language, such as how we expressed how leaders need to appear like men/fathers and walk with good posture, treat their company as their child, etc.. The professor talked about the differences between leadership and management and how these two features are very well defined and overlapping in western countries where as these features are not well defined in China and there is not much overlap between the two. He talked about how Leadership and Management are very difficult to transfer from country to country and gave a few examples of companies that came to China with leadership and management that reflected their domestic country and failed, but then changed these features to reflect the Chinese culture and became very successful. In China leadership/management oftentimes follows a paternalistic style that has several pro's and con's. This paternalistic style has 3 main components: Authoritarian, Moral, and Benevolence. All and all this was a very interesting lecture and I never knew just how important understanding cultural differences is to have success in an international business environment.