Leadership, social power, and reciprocity: Promoting effective leadership through the classification of subordinates' reward preferences

This thesis presents an investigation of the effects of subordinates' resource preferences on their job- and supervisor-related attitudes and behaviors. The overlap between the literature on leadership and that on social power provided a theoretically sound means by which to classify potential resources given to employees by their supervisors within organizations. A brief description of many of the leadership theories that appear in the Industrial/Organizational literature, illustrates the array of resources that are at a supervisor's disposable and the need for a classification scheme; the taxonomy of social power provides the framework to create one. In addition to the notion of refraining leader-given resources as subordinate resource preferences and classifying them within a taxonomy, the notion of resource receipt is also addressed.; A succession of studies was conducted to determine the best items for inclusion in the Resource Opportunity Identifier, the survey that was used for the main study's data collection. The results indicate that a 5-dimension taxonomy of leader-given resources suitably serves as a means of categorizing what subordinates want from their relationships with their supervisors. In addition, subordinates who are motivated by one or another of the dimensions included in the taxonomy hold different attitudes and behave differently towards their supervisors, their jobs, and their organizations. Subordinates' wanting resources was not found to have as pronounced an effect as their receiving resources from their supervisors, which was found to be most impactful when subordinates were receiving the resources they valued most highly.; These findings are of practical importance for those attempting to maximize the motivational impact of limited workplace resources. By suggesting that resources may be classified within valued types allows for substitutions to be made within these types as organizationally needed. Further implications and several limitations of the study are discussed.