Generational Differences in Leadership and Conflict Style Preferences within Family Businesses in Taiwan

The results of this study indicate that the Taiwan managers have a fairly high level of consistency in their preference for both a predominant leadership and conflict resolution style. They prefer a participative style of leadership and an introspective/observant style of conflict resolutions. In addition, the owner/managers studied had a good sense of the reality of their perceptions of their own leadership style. Both of these findings are consistent with what might be expected from Chinese and Confusion Philosophy. However, there the strength of these preferences is not as strong in the younger employees indicating a real generational shift in preferred styles. This is particularly clear in terms of the conflict style where there was an increased preference for a more assertive style or Western style of conflict resolution in younger employees. In addition, there was a clear difference in preferred approach to leadership when leadership was looked at from the transformational/transactional theory approach to leadership. The older manager/owners preferred a transactional leadership approach which is more in line with the paternalistic nature of Chinese management. The traditional Chinese approach to management would have predicted that the transactional leadership approach would dominate. The results of this study supported this expectation but only for the older group and not the younger group. The younger group preferred the transformational approach to leadership which may be argued to be closer to modern Western approaches to leadership. One other finding of particular note was that while the relative strength of conflict and leadership style preferences varied slightly, the generational differences were consistent regardless of whether the intergenerational differences were measured inside the same company or across a variety of companies and the groups of older and younger managers/owners were related by organizational membership or completely independent of each other. The results of this study provide additional insights into the role of preferred leadership and conflict styles within organizations in Taiwan