What's happening on the young leaders in China? How they perceive the old and new, eastern and western leadership style? Yes you are right. Writing a Ph.D dissertation to reply this two question can be more practical, otherwise there is hardly any clue.
Applying half-structured interview questionnaire, topics refers to interviewee's professional experience, self evaluation and personal perception of future social tendencies. Two psychologists, Michael and Berenice coming from Zurich Applied Science University(ZHAW), uncovered a tip of the iceberg, or we say dynamic Chinese volcano through their observational research. During 17 days of interacting, more than 3300km traveling, scattered in four locations, the interview group collected stories from 24 young talents. Among interviewees, there were entrepreneurs, Swiss company employees and multi-national enterprises workers. Varying from 25 to 40, rooted in different industries, including finance, mechanical manufacturing, IT, consulting and so on, they were generous to share with the time and ideas.
The research uses several scales to score themselves. Much to surprise, when came to whether it's more "good" or "bad" of their leadership style is, the young were too puzzled to score. They had it as a feedback from others rather than a style they can define themselves. To observe from western standing point, some more differences came out. Another most universe question frequently raised is "cheap" and "expensive" leadership. Michael always illustrate example of luxury Swiss watch to a pirate fake swatch--both function as a timer though there was huge difference in price. Reveals from that, leadership in Chinese context brings out some natural insights.
Two of the most young leaders, the new after 90 generation built up their own business leading groups of after 80 generation. Quick responding to environment and their fellows' need, they are showing flat and mutual communication pattern in companies. One of the young leader's robot company, there are importing the working environment like Google, with workers' hand crafted paper lanterns and projected game player. Another interviewee, previous Baidu technical engineer, went through losing his whole team of 20 people in a night. At the same time, he got bad condition of his hair and teeth in a night. However, raised from failures he established his own technological company and receive millions subscription of their smart phone application. As the dynamic entrepreneurship became a trend, stories like this is happening everyday here in China.
The research group is undertaking quantitative analysis and promising results are in expectation. More interesting results can be looked forward in the near future.