Critique and review of leader–member exchange theory: Issues of agreement, consensus, and excellence

Abstract

The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. Relationship-based leadership 2 AbstractThe relationship quality that develops between leaders and those designated as followers is of longstanding interest to researchers and practitioners. The purpose of the present paper is to review the more recent developments in the field of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory to identify specific issues related to leader-member agreement and follower consensus that have potentially important theoretical and practical implications. We introduce the concept of LMX excellence, which involves high-quality LMX, high leader-member agreement as well as high group consensus in LMX quality. We outline how leaders and followers' behaviour as well as context can enhance or hinder the development of LMX excellence and conclude with an overview of the practical and theoretical implications as well as future research needs.Relationship-based leadership 3The relationship quality that develops between leaders and those designated as followers continues to be a significant topic of interest for leadership researchers and practitioners.Although the leader is the typical focus in much of the leadership-related research (e.g., leader personality traits, behaviours, styles, decisions, and so on), there is longstanding attention to the interactions between leaders and followers in forming and maintaining leadership processes going back to the influential early work of Weber . Although leadership research has advanced beyond Weber, this attention continues to evolve in terms of promoting a more systematic approach to relational or relationship-based leadership (Uhl-Bien, 2006).The most prominent approach that focuses on leader-follower relationships is that of LeaderMember Exchange (LMX), originally introduced as the Vertical Dyad Linkage model (Danserau, Graen, & Haga, 1975).The explicit focus of LMX is on the quality of the dyadic exchange that develops between leaders and followers (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995). The LMX approach was one of the first systematic leadership theories to include the follower in leadership processes. Although one focus is on the reciprocal exchange between a leader and a follower, the theory also acknowledges that both parties contribute to the development and maintenance of the ongoing relationship quality. Meta-analytic research has shown that high quality relationships are associated with positive work-related outcomes, such as follower satisfaction, commitment, and performance (Gerstner & Day, 1997) as well as citizenship behaviour (Ilies,...

Leader–member exchange (LMX), job autonomy, and creative work involvement

“…Under minimal job autonomy conditions, LMX is unrelated to creative work involvement. This implies that a high-quality LMX relationship, which is associated with many numerous work and non-work outcomes (Gerstner & Day, 1997;Ilies et al, 2007;Schyns & Day, 2010), is not sufficient when employees experience job design constraints. Our findings point to the importance of considering both the leader-member relationship and job design issues for increasing creative work involvement.…”

Negative emotions in informal feedback: The benefits of disappointment and drawbacks of anger

“…Maintaining such relationships are noteworthy as research has found that fostering positive relationships can have impacts over time on critical organizational outcomes such as performance, job satisfaction and citizenship behaviors (Schyns and Day, 2010). Moreover, the workplace is becoming more dependent on teams and collaboration (Kozlowski and Bell, 2003), and informal feedback may continually come from our peers owing to increases in the use of processes such as self-managed work groups where leadership functions, such as feedback provision, are shared.…”

Leader-member Exchange (LMX) and Performance: A Meta-Analytic Review

“…Meta-analyses have found higher correlations between leader-rated LMX with performance than with follower-rated LMX (e.g., Gerstner & Day (1997). These differences might be conceptual or methodological in nature (see Schyns & Day, 2010). It would seem therefore important to test whether there are differences between leader-and follower-rated effects on task, citizenship, and counterproductive performance, and whether these effects hold even when common source or method bias is controlled for.…”