|
Using a sample of 229 employees and their 109 immediate
supervisors from 63 organizations in Northern Malaysia,
we tested the hypothesis that the quality of Leader-Member
Exchange (LMX) would have differential impact on career
outcomes depending on whether it was rated by the supervisor
or the subordinate. As expected, we found that the employees'
perceptions of the quality of exchanges differed from those
of their supervisors. Interestingly, supervisor-rated LMX
significantly predicted salary progression and promotability,
whereas subordinate-rated LMX significantly predicted career
satisfaction. The results also revealed that supervisor-rated
LMX and subordinate-rated LMX did not interact significantly
to impact career outcomes. Rather, they singly and distinctively
contributed to career outcomes, thereby suggesting the salience
of their independent effects. Implications of the findings
in the light of potential limitations are discussed.
In the past 25 years or so, substantial research has been
done to understand the nature of exchanges in employee-supervisor
relationships, now known as Leader-Member Exchange (LMX)
theory (Graen et al., 1982; and Graen et al., 1982). The
mountain of research has shown that LMX is related to a
number of important work outcomes such as organizational
commitment (Gagnon and Michael, 2004; Martin et al., 2005;
and Schyns et al., 2005); job satisfaction and work-related
well-being (Martin et al., 2005; Harris and Kacmar, 2006;
and Breland et al., 2007); individual performance and extra-role
behaviors (Scriesheim et al., 1999; and Hackett and Lapierre,
2004); delegation and occupational self-efficacy (Schyns
et al., 2005); turnover intentions, supervisory ratings
of job performance and promotions (Liden and Maslyn, 1998).
While the breadth of LMX research has been remarkable,
studies in this domain still suffer from one obvious limitation.
With a few exceptions (e.g., Schriesheim et al., 1998; Bhal
and Ansari, 2000; and Paglis and Green, 2002), researchers
mostly tend to measure the quality of LMX from the subordinate's
perspective alone, and as a result might not have provided
a comprehensive examination of the impact of LMX, particularly
on career outcomes. Seeking a remedy for these literary
deficiencies, we advance a model that aims to investigate
the differential effects of supervisor and subordinate ratings
of LMX on career outcomes.
Specifically, our study is a follow-up to the research
on LMX and career outcomes and contributes to these literatures
in several ways: (a) LMX ratings were obtained from the
employees and their supervisors to compare the possibly
different perspectives, (b) career outcomes too were conceptualized
as a multidimensional construct, and as such contrasting
the effect of supervisor and subordinate-rated LMX on different
outcome dimensions, and (c) most studies on LMX have been
conducted in the western setting and add to the literature
by testing the differential impact of LMX in the Malaysian
context, thus providing some empirical cross-cultural validity
to leadership theory.
|
