Giving a Good Relationship and Taking Surrogacy: Exploring the Effects for Team Performance

Abstract

The leader-member exchange (LMX) literature proposes that leaders tend to differentiate the quality of relationships among their followers, but it remains unclear how establishing high LMX with some followers may facilitate a positive image of a leader across all team members, and ultimately, a superior team performance. Drawing on data from a three-wave study with 249 healthcare professionals (physicians and nurses), we explore the impact of LMX on employees’ surrogate behaviors and, in turn, team performance. Specifically, using a social exchange perspective, we postulate that high-quality LMX relationships make employees especially motivated to build support for the leader through behaviors that reflect surrogacy (i.e., promoting the leader, defending the leader, and/or modeling followership) as a form of reciprocity. By managing others’ impressions of the leader, surrogate behaviors are able to eliminate many of the barriers that might hinder team performance. Our findings corroborate our theoretical model showing that LMX increases employees’ surrogate behaviors and, in turn, team performance. Moreover, the results indicate that the amount of prestige within the team is an important boundary condition of the LMX-surrogacy relationship, such that the effects of LMX on surrogate behaviors are stronger when employees have higher levels of prestige in their teams. Overall, the study provides evidence that the social facilitation and impression management effects of surrogacy phenomenon, enacted as a result of the “give and take” nature of LMX relationships, is associated to team performance.