Paternalistic leadership is a leadership paradigm rooted in the indigenous Chinese cultural context. This paper reviews over 59 Chinese and English articles from the WOS database published in the last decade, aiming to clarify the research trajectory of its underlying mechanisms. The review finds that benevolent and moral leadership consistently yield positive effects on employee innovation, voice, safety behavior, and work engagement through pathways such as enhancing the quality of social exchange, boosting psychological capital, and fostering organizational identification. Authoritarian leadership, however, functions as a double-edged sword. Its negative impacts are often associated with psychological strain and silence behavior, yet it may serve order-maintaining functions in crisis situations or within high power-distance cultures. The mediating mechanisms encompass cognitive, affective, motivational, and social exchange pathways, while cultural values, organizational climate, and individual traits constitute key moderating factors. Current research still harbors debates regarding the contextual legitimacy of authoritarian leadership, its cross-cultural generalizability, and its dynamic evolution. Future research needs to the investigation into the dynamic effects of the combined application of authority and benevolence , expand the indigenous construction of the theory in non-Asian cultural contexts, and focus on the adaptation of leadership styles in new contexts such as digital transformation.