Research On The Dimensionality Of Leader-Member Exchange In Enterprises

Entering the Knowledge Economy, the competitions between enterprises focus on the Human Resource in large degree. How to make the best use of competent people and retain the people is becoming a very important factor in the enterprises' development. However, the enterprises can only make a solid basis for the future human resource competition through establishing the positive and healthy leader member relationships. Leader-Member Exchange is a such kind of useful theory to research the relationship between people in enterprises and organizations, especially between the managers and subordinates. In order to clearly comprehend the Leader-Member Exchange, it is important to understand its construct, that is to understand how many dimensions it has and what are the specific contents of each dimension.Leader-Member Exchange is a key topic in the field of leadership, it is also one of the hotspots in western Industrial and Organizational Behavior. Western scholars have done a lot of researches in this field and gained some important fruits. However, although there are some introductions on this theory, domestic researches on LMX dimension are very few owing to some restrictions, especially on the positive research. Under this circumstance, this thesis operates the positive research through clinically psychological interviews and questionnaire method based on the Chengdu city and vicinity.Through systemic analysis on the recent tens of years outcomes on LMX andits dimension, this thesis proposes a new way to define LMX dimension: LMX dimension should consist of LMX dimension from the perspective of the leader and the perspective of the subordinate.We use Kelly Repertory Grid Technique, a clinic psychological method which is widely used in the management research, to interview 30 middle-level people in different companies and organizations. Among them, 15 people are interviewed as the subordinates and others are interviewed as the leaders. Through interviews, we get the aggregate constructs from both the leader perspective and subordinate perspective. Using RepGrid program, we also get the cognitive map to reflect these interviewees' ideas on such relationship.Based on the interview, we collect and analyze the aggregate constructs, and design the LMX questionnaire from both perspectives. We receive 236 questionnaires from leaders and 245 from subordinates and elicit the dimensions from the perspective of leaders and the perspective of subordinates respectively through factor analysis.At last, we use convergent and discriminant validation to proof the research outcome.This thesis tries to operate a positive research on LMX in enterprises from a new approach. Such kind of research calls on continuous investigations with proper methods and enough samples. Present research is a part of the whole research, in the near future we will validate and update our outcome in a larger sample and follow-up analysis to get the final LMX dimension and its mechanism.