Predicting Leader-Member Exchange: Integrating Relational Cognition and Emotion

Abstract

The role of the manager spans multiple levels of analysis as managers influence their individual subordinates, teams, and sometimes organizations as well as entire industries. When taking a dyadic perspective of management, the most prevalent theoretical framework is Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), which focuses on the quality of reciprocal exchanges within unique manager-subordinate relationships. High-quality LMX relationships are linked to beneficial outcomes for organizations; however, the LMX domain suffers from multiple theoretical and methodological issues, including a lack of dyadic research as well as a lack of focus on relational predictors that serve to develop and sustain high-quality LMX relationships. This work addresses this gap in the literature by drawing upon the multidisciplinary relationship sciences to examine relational cognition and emotion as predictive of both manager and subordinate LMX. We introduce the concept of communal relational motives to the LMX literature and examine its interplay with the emotional tone of the manager-subordinate relationship. We found that manager-subordinate agreement in the strength of their communal motive towards one another is predictive of manager LMX; while the manager-subordinate discrepancy in communal strength is more likely to influence subordinate LMX. However, the accumulated experience of positive emotions in the manager-subordinate relationship was the most important for predicting manager and subordinate LMX. Based on these findings, we discuss future avenues for research on manager-subordinate relationships.