Search results

This paper aims to examine the mediating roles of self-efficacy and team commitment in linking service employees’ relative leader-member exchange (RLMX) with customer service behaviors and also the moderating roles of team-level differentiations in leader-member exchange (LMX) and team-member exchange (TMX) in influencing these mediation processes.

Data were collected from 467 customer-contact employees working in hotel restaurants. Hierarchical linear modeling analysis was used to test the mediation hypotheses, and moderated path was used to assess the moderated mediation.

Self-efficacy and team-commitment both mediated the relationship between RLMX and customer service behaviors. The differentiations in LMX and TMX significantly interacted with RLMX in predicting self-efficacy and team commitment and also moderated the indirect effects of RLMX on customer service behaviors.

Future studies need to incorporate customers’ or immediate supervisors’ ratings of subordinates’ customer service behaviors and replicate the findings in different countries and work settings.

Hospitality managers should foster a work environment wherein they develop equal quality relationships with their subordinates in a workgroup and promote high-quality relationships among subordinates in the workgroup to improve subordinates’ self-efficacy, team commitment and, subsequently, their customer service behaviors.

This study incorporates both self-efficacy and team commitment as motivation-based and social exchange-based mediators, respectively, in predicting customer service behavior. It also extends the boundary condition for the mediations by considering the team-level differentiations in both vertical exchange (LMX) and horizontal exchange (TMX).

Emotional intelligence (EI) is deemed important in developing interpersonal relationships. However, in the development of team-member exchange (TMX), the effect of EI on TMX and the team context have been largely ignored. For filling these gaps, this study explores the effect of employee EI on employee TMX and introduces EI-based leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation as a team context to moderate the EI-TMX relationship.

Data were drawn from 51 teams (consisting of 293 followers and 51 team leaders) selected from 30 companies (across the industries of technology, real estate, commerce and manufacturing).

Results revealed that employee EI was positively related to employee TMX. EI acted as the basis of LMX differentiation (EI was positively related to LMX, EI variety was positively associated with LMX differentiation), and EI-based LMX differentiation acted as a favorable context for high-EI employees to develop high-quality TMX.

This study contributes to the understanding of EI’s significant and complex influence on interpersonal exchange relationships between leaders, followers and coworkers.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation on team creativity by developing a moderated mediation model. The model focuses on the mediating role of relationship conflict in linking LMX differentiation with team creativity and the moderating role of team-member exchange (TMX) median in influencing the mediation.

The authors tested the model with a time-lagged field survey data from 358 employees and 98 supervisors belonging to 98 teams in a large diversified company with more than 15,000 employees, based in Shanghai, Southeastern China. In the first stage (T1), employees assessed LMX, TMX, relationship conflict, and control variables. In the second stage (T2), the leaders were asked to report team creativity.

Results indicated that the relationship between LMX differentiation and team creativity was mediated by relationship conflict. Moderated mediation analyses further revealed that relationship conflict mediated the relationship between LMX differentiation and team creativity for only those teams with low-TMX median.

Testing the moderated mediation model helps to advance our theoretical understanding of the intervening processes that underlie the effect of LMX differentiation on team creativity. The findings may also help Chinese managers to inform the importance of helping subordinates better adapt to LMX differentiation, reducing relationship conflict, and constructing high-quality TMX relationships within groups, in order to promote team creativity.

This empirical study provides preliminary evidence of the mediating role of relationship conflict in the negative relationship between LMX differentiation and team creativity. The moderated mediation model also extends the existing finding by showing that not only the quality of social exchange relationships with a supervisor (i.e. LMX) but also with team members (i.e. TMX), can moderate the impact of LMX differentiation on team outcomes.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation and team members’ job performance. The conceptual model developed in this paper also investigates the moderating role of the perception of organisational politics (POP) in affecting the association between LMX differentiation and team members’ job performance.

The authors collected data using a survey from 32 Chinese firms. The questionnaire included scales measuring LMX, POP, job performance, and demographic variables. The final sample consisted of 122 teams with 561 employees. The hypothesised relationships among variables were assessed using hierarchical linear modelling.

The results show that the higher the LMX differentiation, the lower the level of team members’ contextual performance. The authors also found that POP has a significant effect in positively moderating the relationships between LMX differentiation and team members’ contextual and task performances.

The conceptual model developed and verified in this paper provides essential insights for the research on LMX and job performance. Future studies are suggested to collect cross-national data to examine the conclusions of this study.

The association between LMX differentiation and team members’ job performance is moderated by the degree of POP.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual model that delineates the psychological process and boundary condition of how leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation influences team performance.

Based on theories of LMX and social information processing, it is argued that several important mechanisms underpin the relationship between LMX differentiation and team performance. The role of these variables in the relationship is discussed.

The team mechanisms such as affective climate and team-member exchange (TMX) serve as a boundary condition and psychological process to influence the LMX differentiation-team performance relationship. Their conceptual significance and how they affect the relationship are discussed.

This study focusses on theorizing TMX and affective climate as key variables in the LMX differentiation-team performance relationship. Future research considers examining the relative importance of other variables such as team potency or team cohesion to advance the understanding of the precise mechanisms that explain the relationship.

The proposed model increases the understanding of the role of affective climate in the relationships between LMX differentiation, TMX and team performance. It helps minimize the negative effect of LMX differentiation, and may ultimately lead to better team performance.

Although the implication of LMX differentiation has been discussed extensively, the research has not yet led to a firm conclusion as to its relationship with team outcomes. This study is one of the first to theorize affective climate and TMX as an important psychological mechanism and boundary condition to simultaneously influence the LMX differentiation – team performance relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of team-member exchange (TMX) differentiation on team creativity by developing a moderated mediation model. The model focuses on the mediating role of team proactivity in linking TMX differentiation with team creativity and the moderating role of leader-member exchange (LMX) median in influencing the mediation.

A time-lagged field survey data from 331 employees and 68 team leaders in more than ten high-technology firms from Northern China was used to test the model.

Results indicated that the negative relationship between TMX differentiation and team creativity was mediated by team proactivity. Moderated mediation analyses further revealed that team proactivity mediated the relationship between TMX differentiation and team creativity for only those teams with a low-LMX median.

The empirical study provides preliminary evidence of the mediating role of team proactivity in the negative relationship between TMX differentiation and team creativity. The moderated mediation model also extends the existing finding by showing that LMX quality can moderate the indirect impact of TMX differentiation on team creativity (via team proactivity).

The impact of leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation on group performance has been considered ambiguous. The purpose of this paper is to resolve this ambiguity by theorizing and examining a curvilinear relationship between LMX differentiation and group performance, and the moderating effects of group diversity on this relationship.

Data were drawn from 63 work groups (consisting of 322 members and 63 group leaders) selected from 27 technology service companies in South Korea. Group members rated their perceived LMX quality, while the human resource (HR) directors of each company assessed group performance.

The results showed that LMX differentiation had an inverted U-shaped relationship with group performance and that gender diversity and age diversity negatively moderated that relationship. However, the interaction between LMX differentiation and education-level diversity was not significant.

This study extends extant research by addressing the inconsistency among theoretical perspectives on the effects of LMX differentiation. This study transcends earlier research by considering the complex process of LMX differentiation, such as the curvilinear relationship between LMX differentiation and group performance, and the moderating effects of group diversity on that relationship.

Clinician turnover in mental health settings impacts service quality, including availability and delivery of evidence-based practices. Leadership is associated with organizational climate, team functioning and clinician turnover intentions (TI). This study examines leader–member exchange (LMX), reflecting the relationship between a supervisor and each supervisee, using mean team LMX, dispersion of individual clinician ratings compared to team members (i.e. relative LMX) and team level variability (i.e. LMX differentiation), in relation to organizational climate and clinician TI.

Survey data were collected from 363 clinicians, nested in children's mental health agency workgroups, providing county-contracted outpatient services to youth and families. A moderated mediation path analysis examined cross-level associations of leader–member exchange with organizational climate and turnover intentions.

Lower relative LMX and greater LMX differentiation were associated with higher clinician TI. Higher team-level demoralizing climate also predicted higher TI. These findings indicate that poorer LMX and more variability in LMX at the team level are related to clinician TI.

This study describes both team- and clinician-level factors on clinician TI. Few studies have examined LMX in mental health, and fewer still have examined relative LMX and LMX differentiation associations with organizational climate and TI. These findings highlight the importance of leader–follower relationships and organizational climate and their associations with clinician TIs. Mental health service systems and organizations can address these issues through fostering more positive supervisor–supervisee relationships.

The purpose of this paper is to extend our understanding of the role of leaders in team relationship conflict. Leader-member exchange (LMX) differentiation was hypothesized to be positively related to team relationship conflict. Additionally, ethical leadership was hypothesized to moderate relations between LMX differentiation and team relationship conflict.

Hypotheses were examined in a sample of 79 working teams. Data were collected via a questionnaire containing measures of LMX, team relationship conflict and ethical leadership.

Hypotheses were supported by the data. LMX differentiation was positively related to team relationship conflict, and ethical leadership weakened the relationship between LMX differentiation and team relationship conflict.

This is the first theoretical analysis and empirical study of relationships between LMX differentiation and team relationship conflict. Theoretically, by using LMX theory to account for team-level outcomes, this study extended power of LMX theory. Practically, these results suggest that leaders may be responsible for team relationship conflict.

Employees’ knowledge management, which influences creativity, is a pivotal resource in organizational innovation activities, as it helps activate the knowledge resource pool and improves knowledge flow. Using social information processing theory, this study aims to construct a cross-level model to examine how knowledge hiding plays a role in the relationship between leader–member exchange differentiation (LMXD) and employee creativity.

This study surveyed 754 leader–employee matching samples from 127 teams in China innovation enterprises at two time points. Confirmatory factor analysis, convergent analysis, hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping method by SPSS and AMOS were used to test the hypotheses.

The empirical results demonstrate the cross-level model’s efficiency and reveal the following findings: Team-level LMXD is negatively related to employee creativity, whereas it is positively related to knowledge hiding; knowledge hiding is negatively associated with employee creativity; thus, knowledge hiding plays a mediating role in the relationships between them.

Based on the knowledge-hiding perspective, this study analyzed an underlying mechanism between LMXD and employee creativity, thereby further enriching the literature on the influence of knowledge management. This proposed connection has not been established previously. Moreover, the findings respond to the reasons for the inconsistent conclusions of previous literature on the cross-level relationship between LMXD and employee creativity based on the social information processing theory. It thus clarifies the cross-level influence path, as well as provides a theoretical basis for further research on the relationship between the two.