Methodology

Subjects

We investigated 30 companies in Beijing, Hebei and Tianjin; we distributed 900 questionnaires and obtained 711 valid questionnaires. Specifically, in the sample, 23.4% are state-owned enterprises, 34.8% private enterprises, 19.8% foreign-funded enterprises and 22.0% firms of other types; 75.8% are front-line workers, 14.5% front-line managers and 9.8% middle-level and senior managers; 72.0% are working for less than 3 years, 16.5% between 3 and 7 years and 11.4% more than 7 years. Among the surveyed, 48.9% have a college degree or below, 39.9% a bachelor's degree and 11.2% a postgraduate degree; 49.5% male and 50.5% female; 68.2% of the surveyed enterprises have between 1 and 500 employees, 17.2% between 501 and 2000 employees and 14.6% more than 2000 employees; 12.4% of employees are working at enterprises in the start-up stage, 44.5% in the growth stage, 26.3% in the mature stage and 16.7% in the re-innovation stage.

MEASURES

The paternalistic leadership questionnaire of Zheng Boxun et al. (2000) was adopted as the paternalistic leadership questionnaire, which consisted of 33 items, including 11 items on benevolent leadership. 9 items on moral leadership, and 13 items on authoritarian leadership. The organizational learning questionnaire is the 29-item and six-factor questionnaire developed in this study. The Likert five-point scoring method was used in both scales, and the subjects were asked to evaluate the consistent with the companies where they work.

Statistical method

SPSS 10.0 was used for statistical analysis.

98 The generative mechanism of organizational learning

Research results

Results of descriptive statistics

The descriptive statistics for research variables are shown in Table 4.3. The results show that the internal consistency coefficient of paternalistic leadership and each organizational learning dimension is between 0.69 and 0.89, which meets the basic requirements of psychometrics.