The effects of cognitive style on leader‐member exchange: A study of manager‐subordinate dyads

Abstract

The similarity‐attraction paradigm suggests that congruence between the cognitive styles of managers and their subordinates may result in positive leader‐member relationships. A study of 142 manager‐subordinate dyads in two large manufacturing organizations fails to support this idea. Findings suggest, however, that intuitive leaders may be less dominating and more nurturing than their analytic colleagues, and that they are more liked and respected by analytic members than analytic leaders are by intuitive members. Results also indicate that the degree of difference between leader and member cognitive styles may influence the nature of the relationship. Practical implications depend on whether cognitive style is stable or malleable.

Do Birds of a Feather Communicate Better? The Cognitive Style Congruence Between Managers and Their Employees and Communication Satisfaction

“…Although there are some disagreements between earlier (Cooper & Miller, 1991;Handley, 1982;Turban & Jones, 1988) and more recent (Allinson et al, 2001;Armstrong et al, 2004;Glomb & Welsh, 2005;KristofBrown et al, 2005) studies on whether similarity of cognitive style will lead to better communication satisfaction or whether a manager with a certain cognitive style will be preferred by all employees regardless of employee cognitive style match or mismatch, or whether a complimentary cognitive style where differences will improve the communication satisfaction, in the high context cultural environment that we conducted our study, we expect that similarity will lead to improved communication satisfaction. Therefore, we hypothesize that:…”

“…There are also some conflicting results in the literature on what happens when the direction of the incongruence is different. Some studies show that analytic managers are preferred even by intuitive followers (Armstrong et al, 2004) whereas others report that intuitive managers are more liked by analytic followers (Allinson et al, 2001).…”

“…A significant shortcoming of existing studies on cognitive style congruence is the fact that they have used a difference score approach to measure the absolute distance between cognitive style scores of the dyads or a median split approach to categorize the cognitive styles (Allinson, Armstrong, & Hayes, 2001;Armstrong, Allinson, & Hayes, 2002, 2004Armstrong & Priola, 2001;Lin, Kao, & Chang, 2010;Vanderheyden & De Baets, 2015). The difference score fails to differentiate between the relationship among an analytic manager managing an intuitive employee and an intuitive manager managing an analytic employee, since the difference in the scores would be the same in both cases.…”

How Employees See Their Roles: The Effect of Interactional Justice and Gender

“…The inconsistent expectation of job responsibilities may negatively affect the relationship between a supervisor and a subordinate [26]. In addition, demographic similarity in a supervisor-subordinate dyad relates to cognitive similarity [26,27]. This suggests that a supervisor-subordinate dyad of the same sex creates a common frame of reference, resulting in increased interpersonal attraction and communication [26].…”

Differences in Male and Female Athletes and their Perceptions of an Ideal Coach with Respect to Locus of Control, Competitiveness, Goal-orientation and Win-orientation

“…For example, Allinson, Armstrong, and Hayes (2001) investigated the similarity-attraction paradigm in terms of leader-member exchange relationships. They found that the degree of difference between leader and member cognitive styles may influence the nature of the personal relationship or congruence between them.…”