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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of leader’s construal level, which is the tendency of the leader to construe things abstractly or concretely, on leader-member exchange (LMX) quality and the moderating role of relational demography, which is the comparative similarity between supervisor and subordinate in demographic characteristics. The authors hypothesize a positive relationship between leader construal level and the quality of relationship, such that, as the leader’s construal level increases and becomes more abstract, the quality of relationship improves. Furthermore, demographic similarity is expected to moderate the relationship between leader construal level and LMX quality.

Data were collected from 159 employees with an online questionnaire. Hierarchical regression analysis was used for hypothesis testing.

Results show that the leader’s construal level is positively associated with LMX quality. Moreover, demographic similarity moderates this relationship such that when subordinate and supervisor have similar demographic characteristics, the effect of leader construal level on LMX is higher.

This study addresses the call for further research on leader-related antecedents of LMX by showing that leader construal level predicts relationship quality. This study also enhances our understanding of how to leverage the construal level in leadership research. Moreover, this study provides a deeper and more integrated understanding regarding the development of LMX relationships by delineating the interactive effect of leader-related features and relational demography.

Given the harmful effects of workplace incivility and the calls for revealing the antecedents of instigated incivility, this study examines how employee-instigated incivility unfolds as a result of negative mood contagion from leaders to employees.

Drawing upon affective events theory, the authors hypothesized that leader negative mood is contagious and has an indirect relationship with employee-instigated incivility through employee negative mood. For hypothesis testing, data were collected from 243 leader-employee dyads and tested using bootstrapped mediation analysis.

As hypothesized, leader negative mood was associated with employee-instigated incivility indirectly through employee negative mood. This finding supports that negative mood of the leader is contagious and might unintendedly trigger employee-instigated incivility toward other at work.

Given the cross-sectional design of this study, causal inferences could not be drawn. The direction of relationships between the variables is based on the theoretical assumptions, rather than a test of the causal ordering of the variables.

This study advances the limited literature on the antecedents of employee-instigated incivility by demonstrating the impact of negative mood experienced by leaders on uncivil behaviors of employees.

The purpose of this study is to investigate whether leader-follower similarity in construal level of the work, which indicates the degree of abstraction applied to mental representation of the work, influences the quality of interpersonal relationship at work.

First, an interview study was conducted to adapt the work-based construal-level (WBCL) scale. Then, a survey study was conducted for hypothesis testing. Data collected from 245 matched supervisor-subordinate dyads were analyzed using multi-level modeling.

Results revealed that dyadic similarity in work-domain construal level is positively related to leader-member exchange (LMX) quality. As a leader and a follower become similar to each other in terms of mental representation (i.e. construal level) of work, they experience higher relationship quality.

This study enhances the current knowledge of the role of cognition and cognitive similarity in leadership processes.