WHEN WORRY COMES TO WORK
A Seven-Part Leadership Series
How Leadership Trust Develops One Interaction at a Time
Trust rarely arrives because someone has a leadership title.
It develops through experience.
Leader-Member Exchange theory provides a useful way of thinking about that development. Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) described three stages in the development of a leader-member relationship: Stranger, Acquaintance, and Partnership.
I find these stages useful because they remind us that relationships at work are not static.
They grow, stall, strengthen, weaken, and occasionally recover.
The Stranger stage begins with a largely transactional relationship. The leader and employee are learning what they can expect from one another. The relationship is shaped primarily by formal responsibilities, job requirements, organizational structure, compensation, and established expectations (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995).
There may not yet be significant trust.
That makes clarity particularly important.
A new employee needs to know what their job is.
They need to understand what success looks like.
They need to know who makes which decisions.
They need access to the resources required to perform the work.
They need to know when and how to bring a problem forward.
That sounds basic.
It is also where leadership often makes work unnecessarily difficult.
We hand someone a job description written three years ago, introduce them to the team, give them access to a folder containing fifty documents, and tell them to reach out if they have any questions.
Then everyone becomes busy.
For someone experiencing anxiety around uncertainty, that lack of structure can create significant additional pressure.
Clarity cannot remove all uncertainty, but it can remove uncertainty that never needed to exist.
As the relationship develops, Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) describe an Acquaintance stage. Here, the relationship begins to move beyond formal exchange. Trust, respect, and reciprocal commitment start developing.
The employee may gain more freedom to discuss how work is completed. Communication becomes broader. The leader learns more about the employee’s strengths, judgment, preferences, and capabilities.
This matters because greater involvement can increase a person’s sense of influence and control within their work.
Research has connected stronger LMX relationships with greater workgroup integration, access to social resources, psychological well-being, and employee participation in shaping aspects of their roles (Martin et al., 2005; Rousseau et al., 2008).
For an employee experiencing significant workplace anxiety, that increased ability to ask questions, clarify expectations, and participate in problem solving may help reduce some of the stress surrounding their work.
The final LMX stage is Partnership.
At this stage, the relationship is characterized by high levels of trust, respect, commitment, communication, and reciprocal influence (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995; Northouse, 2022).
The employee is no longer simply completing assigned tasks.
There is confidence in the relationship.
The leader trusts the employee’s judgment. The employee knows the leader is accessible when something exceeds their authority or resources. Difficult conversations are possible because the relationship can hold them.
Harris et al. (2009) connected stronger LMX relationships with empowerment, job satisfaction, performance, and lower turnover intentions.
The important point is not that leaders should rush people through three theoretical stages.
Relationships do not work like a checklist.
The lesson is simpler.
Trust grows through repeated evidence that the relationship can be trusted.
Every interaction contributes something.
A leader who promises to follow up and does so contributes something.
A leader who gives clear feedback contributes something.
A leader who listens without immediately becoming defensive contributes something.
A leader who admits they do not yet know the answer contributes something.
So does the leader who repeatedly cancels one-on-ones.
The leader who withholds information.
The leader whose response depends on their mood.
The leader who asks for honesty and punishes it when it arrives.
Trust develops one way or the other.
This is particularly important when employees are navigating uncertainty.
People notice whether the relationship around them is stable.
That does not mean leaders must become endlessly available or remove difficult expectations.
Boundaries matter.
Accountability matters.
Performance matters.
So does the quality of the relationship in which all three are experienced.
Reflection
What evidence have you given your employees recently that your leadership relationship can be trusted?
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.
Martin, R., Thomas, G., Charles, K., Epitropaki, O., & McNamara, R. (2005). The role of leader-member exchanges in mediating the relationship between locus of control and work reactions. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 78(1), 141–147.
Northouse, P. G. (2022). Leadership: Theory and practice (9th ed.). SAGE Publications.
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.