Follower-Valued Leadership: How Contemporary Urban Hui Muslims Conceptualize Assigned Leadership

摘要

Studies on leadership dynamics abound in scholarly journals. However, studies that give a voice to followers about their experiences with leadership are lacking in both the Chinese context and among Islamic peoples. The purpose of this follower-centered study is to investigate how the Hui, a minority Muslim ethnic group in an urban center in Northwest China, conceptualize assigned leadership. Employing a qualitative design, data were collected from 14 urban Hui Muslims via unstructured and semi-structured interviews. Participants were invited to retell their past experiences with those in assigned leadership, and to describe excellent and poor leadership from their perspective as a Muslim minority in a Communist country. Participants were selected purposefully, seeking maximum variation in socioeconomic level, education, gender, and age. Grounded theory principles were used for data collection and analysis, so that these two facets of qualitative inquiry occurred simultaneously and recursively. Findings indicated that Hui interviewees believe their context to include very few assigned leaders who would be evaluated as good, and yet Hui followers expect these leaders to be somewhat progressive in their thinking and practice. Participants described assigned leader roles as being characterized by superiors who are active developers of followers, skilled administrators, possessors and purveyors of knowledge, and people of solid integrity. Hui respondents also indicated that they envision excellent leaders being exemplars of moral excellence and possessors of prominent professional ability, who simultaneously evince kind-heartedness and care toward their subordinates and treat followers like family. This study resulted in the creation of an emerging leadership paradigm called follower-valued leadership, which seeks to distill the conceptions of contemporary urban Hui regarding assigned leaders. Follower-valued leadership is characterized by the incarnational attributes of integrity and ability, and by the orientating values of caring for, empowering, and personally relating to followers.