comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

strong sense of “neiren” (inner circle) and “wairen” (outer circle) 2 . There is a very
high level of trust, confidence and loyalty related with anyone considered neiren. People
in this circle have common interests and the same languages, and can get things done
quickly. Generally speaking, people from the same extended family, the same city, even
the same province, or friends, colleagues and acquaintances can be treated as neiren:
inner circle.
Were Graen and Uhl-Bien’s (1991) leadership making process to be attempted, the
process would be flying in the face of a universal Chinese process of creating, defining,
and using in-groups and out-groups to develop a functioning society. With an
overarching research question of “Do individual values have predictive relationships for
leader behaviour preferences?”, LMX theory is an identical state to Chinese managerial
leadership practice and is an ingrained cultural value, and tends to describe rather than
predict. Leadership making would require behavioural engineering of the managerial
leaders and followers to somehow change their cultural values and practices, a
challenge that I did not see as a fruitful undertaking in my lifetime.
In fact in an investigation of Sino-American joint ventures in mainland China, Hui and
Graen (1997) conclude that the guanxi system can compromise Western leadership
relations such as articulated in Leader-member Exchange Theory (LMX). Hui and
Graen state that LMX relationships may be identified as important to leadership
building in Japan and America, and guanxi can be identified as important to leadership
building in mainland China and for Chinese outside of China. They note that an
important difference between LMX relationships and guanxi is that the former is more
volitional whereas the latter is more deterministic. These distinctions were determined
to eliminate LMX theory as an approach for comparing the relationship of leader
behaviour and values amongst countries with guanxi-like systems with countries that
did not.
2
When referring to foreigners, neiren and wairen have another meaning. Foreign Chinese-heritage people
are sometimes treated as neiren while other foreigners are wairen. Overseas-born Chinese are still
expected to have the same way of thinking and doing things. If not, they can sometimes also be treated as
“foreigners” or wairen. This concept is also applied within China and within Chinese relationships.
Someone from another city or another part of China can be treated as a “wai di ren”, foreigners from
within China, as opposed to “wai guo ren”, foreigners from outside China. Success in China is
contingent upon establishment of a neiren network and making use of it to expand the network and (build
relationships), create obligations, and facilitate accomplishing tasks.
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