Research Interests

Chinese thought, Business Ethics, Social Science, Leadership

Research

My research focuses on the intersection of business ethics, social science, and Chinese thought. In particular, my research aims at developing a non-Western leadership model informed by empirical work from the social sciences. It is motivated by observing how multinational organizations operate across a variety of Western and non-Western contexts, often with a lack of sensitivity to non-Western views, but rarely has the actual practice of adapting to those non-Western contexts made it back into the theorizing about these matters in the English literature.

The primary goal of my dissertation is to explore how early Confucianism measures up to current models of leadership and how it can benefit these contemporary models. As a theory, Confucianism tends to emphasize leadership qualities such that it can be compared with current organizational leadership paradigms. Organizational leadership typically involves a leader orienting their business or community towards certain goals while also looking for effective methods to motivate individuals toward achieving those goals. The actual practice of organizational leadership often invokes models that aim at accomplishing this. I believe that some elements found in Confucianism can be used to develop a distinct organizational leadership model (OLM). My dissertation chapters focus on creating a non-Western, Xunzian-inspired OLM meant to be applied to organizations that could benefit from a more Confucian approach. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I investigate the importance of superior leadership for large multinational corporations as a philosophical topic. More specifically, I call into question some denials of the need for superior leadership. In my second chapter, I turn to current organizational leadership literature in Confucian thought. Most of the existing theories either lack a cogent view of leadership or an in-depth understanding of Confucian leadership for large hierarchical organizations. In my third chapter, I construct how a Confucian OLM might look, based on the classical Confucian Xunzi. In my final chapter, I utilize the social sciences and other literature to refine this Confucian-inspired OLM and assess its applicability to modern organizations. The benefits of this research project are particularly salient in East Asia, where Confucianism has profoundly influenced only China but also Korea and Japan. Currently, Western OLMs tend to lack cross-cultural relevance or suffer from a lack of theoretical sophistication. Applying Western OLMs to a non-Western culture might prove problematic because cultural value systems may not adhere to the same sort of values encouraged in Western OLMs. Therefore, this research project has direct implications for modern non-Western organizational leadership because it seeks a new OLM that may be a better fit for cultures that do not adhere to Western cultural values.