Paternalistic Leadership and Enterprise Management Innovation: A Moderated Meta Analysis

Leadership style is an important factor influencing enterprise management innovation. Paternalistic leadership is a typical leadership style in China, which has a significant impact on enterprise management innovation. Objective: This paper is to explore the relationship between paternalistic leadership and business management innovation, and analyze potential variables to investigate the source of their differences. Methods: This paper takes 74 empirical studies (157 effect values, total sample size 28335) as the object, using meta-analysis technology to study the relationship between the three leadership types of paternalistic leadership, benevolent leadership, moral leadership and authoritative leadership and multi-focus enterprise management innovation. Based on a multi-dimensional perspective, enterprise management innovation under paternalistic leadership can be divided into: innovation ability orientation and innovation behavior orientation. In the context of paternalistic leadership, it is unclear which level of innovation has a stronger tendency to implement enterprise management innovation. Results: The correlation between benevolent leadership, authoritarian leadership, moral leadership and overall management innovation is 0.377, -0.158 and 0.319; the correlation between moral leadership, benevolent leadership, authoritarian leadership and capability oriented management innovation is 0.344, 0.395 and-0.192 respectively; benevolent leadership has the strongest correlation with behavior and ability oriented management innovation. Conclusion: the relationship between eastern and Western paternalistic leadership and enterprise management innovation is influenced by cultural context and innovation level. Benevolent leadership and moral leadership have significant positive effects on enterprise management innovation, and authoritative leadership has significant negative effects on enterprise management innovation. To a large extent, cross-cultural situations (China, non-China) and levels of innovation (individuals, teams, organizations ) have a moderating effect on the relationship between them.