Leader meets follower – how to leverage great relationships

Xiaotong (Janey) Zheng, Assistant Professor in Leadership and OB, presents new research leader-follower relationships.

Building a great relationship with one’s boss can bring considerable benefits to employees. However, have you ever thought about how your co-workers may respond to your relationship with the boss when you are ‘the favourite’? Or how would you respond to your co-workers who manage to build better relationships with your boss than you do?

Can social comparison at work motivate people? Our research provides new insights into the upsides but also potentially unwanted consequences of leader-member exchange relationships (short: LMX).

In our study, employees proactively leveraged the differences from higher LMX coworkers by either leveling-up (e.g., self-improving) or pulling-down (e.g., undermining) behaviors via different emotional mechanisms – benign and malicious envy.

We also found that coworker's pride played a critical role in qualifying the effects: Perceptions of authentic pride lead down a positive path. It signals those positive relationships are achievable, but require hard work and high performance. Problems occurred when co-workers were seen as proud in a hubristic way. Hubris can tell a different story, for example, that being close to the boss is owed to one’s talent or social status.

For employees who are their boss’s favorite, it is important to think about how they show their pride. To emphasize authentic pride, those employees who build great relationships with their bosses should highlight the efforts that have gone into this. Being the favorite doesn’t come easy after all!

View the full paper published in Journal of Organizational Behavior.