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Although ethical leadership positively relates to a variety of favorable work outcomes across cultural settings, how national/societal culture potentially shapes the behavioral manifestations of ethical leadership remains unclear. In this paper, we investigate behavioral manifestations of ethical leadership in the Chinese context and develop the Chinese Ethical Leadership Scale (CELS). In Study 1, we use an indigenous, qualitative approach to investigate the nature of ethical leadership. Based on the qualitative findings, we develop the CELS, which consists of six important components of Chinese ethical leadership: moral courage, openness to criticism, incorruptibility, reliability, fairness, and role modeling. In Study 2, we empirically show that, after controlling for a Western ethical leadership scale, the six dimensions of Chinese ethical leadership predict various subordinate outcomes, including reporting of wrongdoing, cooperative voice, protection of company resources, conscientiousness, interpersonal harmony, and task performance. Based on our results, we propose a culturally integrated model of ethical leadership that elucidates both ethical and Chinese leadership literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social capital is generally believed to enhance the effectiveness of organizations in certain cultural contexts. However, even with substantial social capital in place, China, during its economic transition towards market systems in the past decades, witnessed problems stemming from underdevelopment and organizational dysfunction. To address this paradox, we delineate a unique type of networks-based social capital in China: dense strong-ties accompanied by sparse weak-ties. Drawing on extant literature, a conceptual framework is proposed to reveal the dynamics of the unique social capital set-up in the Chinese context: first, a view of how the country’s social capital system was formed under conditions of resource scarcity, and of how it was further modified by its unique Chinese cultural contexts; and second, an examination of how Chinese social capital led to certain unfavorable societal and organizational consequences—namely, market fragmentation, state intervention, and rent-seeking activities. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]