The Effect Of LMX Agreement On Employee's Performance: A Status-competition Perspective

Leader-member exchange focuses on the relationship between supervisor and subordinate,the essence of which is dyadic relationship.Despite meta-analytic evidence demonstrating that LMX agreementis only moderate at best,research on LMX typically examines this relationship from only one perspective:either the leader's or the subordinate's.Yet,few studies have focused on LMX agreement,especially its effect on employee performance and the mechanisms between them.Therefore,Scholars call for return to the roots of LMX and explore the effect of LMX agreement on individuals and organizations.This dissertation includes two studies in two research stages.In meta-analytic study,the author sought to explore several theoretically and methodologically meaningful factors that might account for lower levels of agreement.Base on 86 empirical studies and 94 independent samples(N=18,190 dyads),the author found that overall agreement was moderate in nature(r=.36).In addition,the author found that dyadic tenure,LMX dimensionality,culture difference,response inflation and publication status have different moderating effect on LMX agreement.Implications for LMX theory are discussed.Empirical research focuses on one under-researched topic:Whether and how LMX agreement would affect employee's creative and routine performance,and to what degree the effect is.To address this problem and open the black box of the link between LMX agreement and employee performance,based on Status-competition Perspective,the present study utilize the Resource Theory of Social Exchange and introduce variables like P-O Fit and Status as mediators and Criteria for status promotion as the moderator to predict the mechanisms between LMX agreement and employee creative and routine performance and its boundary conditions.The present study explain and answer the following questions:"How LMX quality influence the exchange of resources","What resources do the supervisors and subordinate utilize to exchange","What resources do the dyadic parties want from each other","Under what circumstance,the dyadic resource exchange could be facilitated",etc.The author collects dyadic data,and the final sample is 380 dyads which contains 380 subordinates and 95 supervisors.Results are as follows:Firstly,LMX agreement influence status via P-O fit.According to the polynomial regressions and block variable analysis,this study create a new block construct to represent LMX agreement/disagreement to further explore the indirect effect of LMX agreement on status via P-O fit.Results suggest that P-O fit mediate the link between LMX agreement and individual informal status.Compared with LMX disagreement,LMX agreement could bring about positive effects for both individuals and organizations.Secondly,status has different effect on employee performance.Results suggest that individual informal status positively influence employee routine and creative performance.Compared with routine performance,there is a greater effect of informal status on creative performance.In addition,individual informal status positively influence employees'routine performance,and has insignificant effect on employees' creative performance.Thirdly,LMX agreement has direct and indirect effect on employee performance.Specifically,LMX agreement positively influenced employee routine performance,and had non-significant effect on creative performance.Moreover,LMX agreement could influence employee creative and routine performance via P-O fit and individual informal status.The results suggest that there is a full mediation effect of both P-O fit and individual informal status between LMX agreement and creative performance.Fourthly,Criteria for status promotion have different moderating effect.Specifically,absolute criterion could better strengthen the link between individual informal status and creative performance;relative criterion could better enhance the relationship between individual formal status and routine performance.In addition,absolute criterion could strengthen the indirect effect of LMX agreement on creative performance via P-O fit and individual informal status.According to research results,the adoption of absolute criteria could better motivate individuals with informal status to engage in creative work,and the adoption of relative criterion could better promote individuals with formal status to engage in routine work.Last but not least,the main research findings were discussed and research limitations and directions were put forward.