comparative value priorities of chinese and new zealand

The choice of direction of the original 1997 project in my series of studies of leadership
and culture was to use cultural value dimensions to define and operationalise societal
culture. This study will continue along that path.
This study examines the relationships between individual values as predictors of leader
behaviour preference differences between samples of businesspeople from Guangzhou
City, China, and New Zealand. I also investigate how culture might predict relationships
between value dimensions and preferred leader behaviour dimensions. The situation is
somewhat complicated by the fact that the Schwartz values theory and the
operationalisation using the Schwartz Values Survey (SVS) 57 item version are
experimental. Schwartz has made a large volume of data publically available for the
SVS 56 and 57 versions that have not been used in publications. Hence, using historical,
though unpublished, data some of the work in this review chapter includes analyses and
discussions of invariance of the value dimension priorities in New Zealand and China.
Samples from Guangzhou City, China, and from New Zealand are examined to
determine if certain categories of leader behaviour transcend these two culture areas,
and if others are culture specific. This chapter examines the literature on the behavioural
theory of leadership operationalised by the Leader Behaviour Description Questionnaire
XII (LBDQXII) and the literature on values operationalised by the Schwartz Values
Survey (SVS). There are many theories of culture and leadership, this chapter assumes
good familiarity with the major theories.
The LBDQXII literature review revealed a common circumstance I often find in the
development of experimental field survey research instruments. The LBDQXII and its
predecessors were investigated intensively through the 1960s and 1970s. From about
1976, even though the survey was identified as experimental (Shashkin, 1979),
researchers began employing the LBDQXII to draw conclusions about leader behaviour
in hundreds of studies, frequently with no report of Cronbach alpha reliabilities for the
twelve dimensions for the samples. Hence there is not a great body of recent work on
the reliability and validity of the instrument between 1980 and 1990. From the mid-
1990s some studies have resumed reporting reliability data.
In the literature relating to Schwartz’ SVS, something of an opposite situation exists.
There are dozens of studies attempting to demonstrate the reliability and validity of the
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