In 2000, the organizational psychologists Farh Jiing-Lih and Cheng Bor-Shiuan published an analysis of paternalistic leadership in Chinese organizations in the Taiwan journal Indigenous Psychological Research. Their model has three parts: authoritarian leadership, benevolent leadership and moral leadership.
A 2021 review in Advances in Psychological Science, published by the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, sums up the style as one that combines “absolute authority, elder’s care, and moral role model.”