An investigation of the impact of leader-member exchange, team-member exchange on staff attitudes and perceptions for accounting professionals

This study examined the role of interpersonal relationships, specifically the quality of leader-member exchange (LMX) in conjunction with team-member exchange (TMX) in employee attitudes in terms of organizational commitment, job satisfaction and turnover intention among 202 accounting professionals. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to analyze the casual-effect relationships of the proposed model in its entirety. The findings indicated that LMX and TMX are positively related to organizational affective commitment, but not to continuance commitment. Highly mobile knowledge workers such as accounting professionals are more committed to their profession than to an organization, and therefore, are not concerned with their vested investment in an organization. Organizations wishing to increase employee commitment should focus on the affective commitment by improving the quality of LMX and TMX relationships.; This study also tested a comprehensive model of the turnover process encompassing direct and mediating constructs. Job satisfaction is the only significant direct influence on employee's intent to leave. Professional knowledge workers with vested capital in expertise and skills are likely to move around unless they are satisfied with the work or the job. TMX was not directly related to job satisfaction, but was mediated by affective commitment. Job satisfaction also mediated the effect from affective commitment to turnover intention. The quality of LMX and affective commitment are important antecedents of job satisfaction. This study enhances management's understandings of group network exchange relationships involving multi-level supervisors and subordinates. An interactive strategy in human resource management is recommended to initiate activities that will improve the quality of LMX, TMX and job satisfaction to design modern retention strategies.