Differentiated Leader-member Exchanges And Team Members’Performance:A Cross-level Study On Chinese Firms

The leader’s leadership behavior has always been a hot spot in the field of organizational behavior research. Leader-member Exchange Theory as the one of the most important progress in this field for nearly30years broke the premise of the trait theory of leadership and the default style theory. This theory emphasizes the idea that leaders form different relationships with each follower and adopt different managerial strategies on them, in a dynamic and differentiated way to understand the relationship between leaders and followers. Plenty of studies have been used to explain the phenomenon that high-or low-quality relationships with leaders will affect members’attitude, cognition, emotion, and behaviors, but only very recent studies began to focus on the core content of LMX theory, namely LMX differentiation. The purpose of this study is to explore the mechanism how LMX differentiation affects on employee attitude and work performance, mediated by supervisory commitment under the circumstance of organizational politics.This paper firstly sorted out the existing literature of LMX differentiation, perception of organizational politics, supervisory commitment and job performance, and formed the research framework based on the leader-member exchange theory and social comparison theory. Secondly, this paper focused on the mechanism of how LMX differentiation affected on task performance and contextual performance, the moderation of perception of organizational politics and the mediation of supervisory commitment. And then we put forward the hypotheses and research model. Thirdly, this paper obtained the formal questionnaire through compiling and modifying the questionnaire, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, the tests of the reliability, validity, variance, correlation and multilevel analysis had been used to validate the hypotheses and build the research model.Research result shows that various individual and enterprise factors differently affect on LMX differentiation, perception of organizational politics, supervisory commitment and job performance. LMX differentiation has a significant and negative influence on contextual performance and supervisory commitment. Supervisory commitment has a mediating effect on LMX differentiation and job performance. Perception of organizational politics has a moderating effect on LMX differentiation and supervisory commitment, which strengthens the negative effect of LMX differentiation on supervisory commitment. Finally, according to the results of empirical research, the paper puts forward several managerial suggestions in reducing differentiated treat behavior, focusing on cultivating employee’s loyalty to supervisor and creating a good atmosphere in a team.