Affective trust in Chinese leaders: Linking paternalistic leadership to employee performance

National Taiwan University Adopting the theoretical framework of social exchange, the authors used the two dominant Confucian values—hierarchy and relationalism—to theorize the mediating role of affective trust in the relationship between paternalistic leadership and employee in-role and extra-role performance in the Chinese organizational context. Data from 601 supervisor–subordinate dyads of 27 companies in a Taiwanese conglomerate revealed that while the benevolence and morality dimensions of paternalistic leadership are positively associated with both in-role and extra-role performance, the authoritarian paternalistic leadership dimension is nega-tively related to subordinate performance. Furthermore, affective trust mediated the relation-ship between benevolent and moral paternalistic leadership and employee performance but Acknowledgments: We thank Bruce Avolio for his constructive comments on an earlier draft of this article. We also thank Action Editor Mark Griffin and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful feedback on this article