WHEN WORRY COMES TO WORK
A Seven-Part Leadership Series
Why Leader-Member Exchange Still Matters
Organizations spend a great deal of time talking about leadership.
We talk about strategy, vision, competencies, accountability, performance, influence, culture, and results.
Employees often experience leadership much more personally.
They experience whether their supervisor answers the question.
Whether the leader listens.
Whether expectations are clear.
Whether they can disagree.
Whether they are trusted.
Whether the leader only appears when something goes wrong.
This is part of what drew me to Leader-Member Exchange theory when I first explored the relationship between leadership and workplace anxiety.
Leader-Member Exchange, commonly called LMX, focuses on the relationship between a leader and an individual follower. Rather than treating leadership as something a leader simply does to a group, LMX examines the quality of the relationship developed between two people (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995).
That relationship develops through social exchange.
Over time, communication, trust, respect, commitment, access, and reciprocal influence shape how the leader and employee work together.
High-quality LMX relationships are associated with a range of positive workplace outcomes. Research has connected LMX with job satisfaction, performance, psychological health, employee empowerment, self-efficacy, and access to workplace resources (Harris et al., 2009; Rousseau et al., 2008; Walumbwa et al., 2011).
That alone should interest executive leaders.
But there is another aspect that interests me even more.
Relationships can change how people experience difficult circumstances.
Think about two employees facing the same organizational change.
Both receive the same announcement.
Both face similar uncertainty.
Both know their role may change.
One has a leader they trust.
The other does not.
The first employee may still be concerned. They may still dislike the change. They may still be uncertain about what happens next.
But they know they can ask questions.
They believe their leader will tell them what is known.
They trust that the leader will acknowledge what is not known.
They expect concerns to be taken seriously.
They believe they will be treated fairly.
The second employee may have none of those assurances.
Same organizational change.
Very different experience of leadership.
People do not experience organizational uncertainty in isolation. They experience it through relationships.
Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) argued that leadership relationships can develop from relatively formal and transactional exchanges toward mature partnerships characterized by greater trust, respect, and mutual obligation.
This does not mean leaders and employees become best friends.
That is not the objective.
Good leadership relationships are not dependent on friendship, personality match, or social similarity.
They are built around trust in the working relationship.
Can I rely on you?
Will you tell me the truth?
Do you understand what I am responsible for?
Will you listen when I identify a problem?
Can I make a mistake and talk with you about it?
Will you provide the resources I need to succeed?
Can we disagree and continue to work together?
Those are practical leadership questions.
For someone experiencing significant workplace anxiety, they may also influence how much additional stress the working relationship creates.
McCarthy et al. (2016) found that the relationship between workplace anxiety and performance depended in part on the quality of social exchange. Their findings suggest that strong social relationships with supervisors and coworkers can act as important workplace resources.
This does not prove that LMX treats General Anxiety Disorder.
My original paper did not find research directly testing that proposition, and it would go beyond the available evidence to claim otherwise.
What the research does suggest is that stronger leader-member and coworker relationships can reduce some workplace stressors, improve access to resources, and support better functioning in stressful environments.
That is enough to deserve serious leadership attention.
If the relationship between employee and leader can influence how people experience work, then relationship quality cannot be treated as a soft extra after the real work gets done.
The relationship is part of how the work gets done.
Reflection
If you asked each person who reports to you what it feels like to bring you a problem, what would they say?
References
Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219–247.
Harris, K. J., Wheeler, A. R., & Kacmar, K. M. (2009). Leader-member exchange and empowerment: Direct and interactive effects on job satisfaction, turnover intentions, and performance. The Leadership Quarterly, 20(3), 371–382.
McCarthy, J. M., Trougakos, J. P., & Cheng, B. H. (2016). Are anxious workers less productive workers? It depends on the quality of social exchange. Journal of Applied Psychology, 101(2), 279–291.
Rousseau, V., Aubé, C., Chiocchio, F., Boudrias, J.-S., & Morin, E. M. (2008). Social interactions at work and psychological health: The role of leader-member exchange and work group integration. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 38(7), 1755–1777.
Walumbwa, F. O., Cropanzano, R., & Goldman, B. M. (2011). How leader-member exchange influences effective work behaviors: Social exchange and internal-external efficacy perspectives. Personnel Psychology, 64(3), 739–770.