知识型团队中领导-成员交换关系差异对成员工作态度的影响:成员间信任的中介作用

The Relationship between Differentiation in LMX and Work Attitude in Knowledge Teams: The Mediating Role of Trust in Teammates

作为领导-成员交换理论中的核心概念,领导-成员关系差异化在近几年得到了学术界的广泛关注。基于此,本文探讨了知识型团队中LMX差异对团队成员工作态度的影响机制。通过对来自不同组织49个知识工作团队的225个成员的调研,展开实证研究。模型的测量建立在个人层面上,研究结果发现:在控制个体LMX质量的基础上,团队成员所感知到的LMX差异与成员的情感承诺负相关,与离职倾向正相关,并且成员间的信任在以上两个关系之间起中介作用。本文的结论有助于进一步揭开LMX差异与其结果变量之间的影响机制,在一定程度上丰富了领导理论。

The leader-subordinate relationship is always viewed as one of the most crucial relationships in the organizational setting from the perspective of organizational dynamics. Many of the early researches on leader-subordinate relationship adopted an average leadership style perspective, which did not correspond with the team management practice. Recently, the leader-member exchange （LMX） theory, evolved from the vertical-dyad linkage, broke this departure and emphasized that leaders developed different quality of relationships with subordinates, ranging from low to high. As the deep exploration and development in LMX theory, the LMX differentiation which is naturally embedded in the phenomenon of LMX, has been a focus in this field and attracted lots of researchers＇ attention. To our knowledge, majority of the present studies on LMX differentiation mainly adopted LMX differentiation as a moderator variable. Literatures directly integrating LMX differentiation with individual-level outcome were very rare. Therefore, to address this imbalance, this study focuses on illuminating the relationship between LMX differentiation and the individual affeetive organizational commitment and turnover intentions, which are considered as two significant aspects of work attitude. According to the literature review on the LMX differentiation, the trust in teammates and work attitude, this study proposed four hypotheses ： 1 ） perceived LMX variability will be negatively related to trust in teammates; 2） LMX differentiation is negatively related to affective organizational commitment, and positively related to employee turnover intentions ; 3 ） trust in teammates is positively related to affeetive organizational commitment, and negatively related to employee turnover intentions; and 4） the relationship between perceived LMX variability and employee work attitude will be mediated by reports of relational trust in teammates. In order to verify the effectiveness of these hypotheses, data were obtained from 225 employees in 49 knowledge groups of diverse organizations in People＇ s Republic of China. Of the sample, 71.4% were female, with a mean age and leader-member dyad tenure of 24.53 and 1.01 years, respectively. Team size ranged from 3 -18 members, with a mean team size of 6.74 members. As for the measurement of different variables, this study depended on a series of mature scales. Specifically, Individual LMX quality was measured using the LMX - 7 scale; the eight-item questionnaire developed by Dirks was used to assess the trust in teammates; the single-item LMX distribution scale which designed by Hooper and Martin （2008） to measure the perceived LMX variability; McKay et al. （2007） scale was adopted to measure turnover intentions; the 8 -item affective commitment scale developed by Allen and Meyer （1990） was used to measure the AOC （ Affective organizational commitment）. The Coefficient alpha values of all the scales indicated that they were appropriate to aggregate the data. Based on the credibility and effectiveness questionnaires, this study conducted the descriptive statistics and correlations for all variables as well as the hierarchical regressions to test all hypotheses above. Our result indicated that, as expected, perceived LMX variability accounted for additional variance in employee work attitude above that accounted for by personal LMX quality. Although personal LMX quality was a strong predictor of employee attitude, perceived LMX variability was also related to employee affeetive organizational commitment and turnover intentions, and this relationship was mediated by reports of personal trust in teammates. Specifically, perceptions of LMX variability were associated with lower reports of personal trust in teammates, which was related to lower levels of employee affective organizational commitment and high levels of turnover intentions. Our study thus contributes to a better understanding of the ＇ black box＇ phenomenon that links LMX differentiation to work attitude and enriches knowledge of the leadership theory. The results from this study have practical implications for leaders＇ decision-making within teams. First, leaders need to carefully handle different quality relationships among team members; second, managers should be cautious about resource allocation within teams. Although this study makes a number of contributions to the extant literature, there are limitations that must be highlighted. The first limitation is the use of cross-sectional self-report data which made the CMV a potential concern to preclude causal inferences. The second limitation is that our model fails to conduct group-level analyses with the samples collected. Another limitation is that our study just explores the mechanism between LMX differentiation and work attitudes through the mediating role of personal trust in teammates, not referring to the moderating effect of the context variables. All of three limitations mentioned above are going to be the directions of the future research.