Leadership transitions and the peaceful rise of China : a comparison of thinking styles of Chinese and Australian managers

The paper explores the thinking styles of Chinese and Australian managers and their reported preferences. Quantitative analysis of survey data from two thinking style inventories was conducted on a sample of 122 Chinese and 71 Australian public sector managers who completed Sofo’s (2002) Thinking Style Inventory (TSI) and Sternberg’s (1997) Forms of Thinking Styles (FTS). The TSI assesses preferences for different thinking styles: conditional, inquiry, exploring, independent and creative. The FTS assesses three thinking style preferences: legislative, executive and judiciary. The findings show that there were statistically significant differences between Chinese and Australian preferences for conditional, inquiry, exploring, independent, executive and judiciary styles of thinking, while there were no statistically significant differences for creative and legislative thinking style preferences.