Unpacking Leadership Style Values on Motivating New Generation Employees’ Prosocial Organizational Behaviors

A Case Study of Chinese Internet Industry

Abstract

Based on current data derived from the International Labour Organization, in 2018, there was a significant rise of Chinese female entrepreneurs in workplaces. One industry that has been viewed the most significantly rise in female leadership is Internet industry, as Chinese women now account for 55% of entrepreneurs within new economy companies. Existing researches distinguished leadership styles into two types based on gender differences. More specifically, men are generally viewed to lead with Task-oriented styles while women have been shown to lead with Interpersonal-oriented styles. However, no studies have directly examined which leadership style can be the most effective when directing GenZ employees in China in terms of prosocial organizational behaviors. In this paper, the author profoundly extends the leadership style values and latent women leadership superiority on motivating prosocial organizational behaviors of Genz employees. Extracting from shared points of leadership styles based on gender types, the author generated 3 hypotheses: Compared with Task-orientated leadership style, interpersonal leadership style is more accepted by Genz employees compared to Millennial (Hypothesis1) and Women prosocial leadership are more acceptable by female GenZ employees (Hypothesis2). Notably, GenZ employees’ prosocial organizational behaviors are motivated when collaborated with most felicitous leaders (Hypothesis3). A sample of 500 applicants in a top internet company were expected to accomplish this research. Consequences provided sufficient evidences for hypothesis 2 through both quantitative and qualitative statistics as well as hypothesis 3. Nevertheless, Hypothesis 1 have not been proved in an accurate manner that generational differences in employees have paltry ramifications of leadership styles preferences. As a matter of fact, both leadership styles are popular among Millennial and Genz employees.