Diversity in leadership: race in leader-member exchanges

Supervisors’ social dominance orientation, nation-based exchange relationships, and team-level outcomes

The prevalence of teams in contemporary organizations and the trend toward diversity in a workforce composed of members from multiple countries have drawn the attention of researchers on the consequences of diversity in workplaces. While there are potential benefits to diversity, relationship conflicts among team members may also result and affect team functioning. The aim of the present study was to explore how supervisors’ social dominance orientation, a tendency to support the arbitrary dominance of specific social groups over others, may relate to relationship conflicts and reduced team commitment within teams. A two-wave study in a sample of 931 individuals from 108 workgroups was conducted to examine the relationship between supervisors’ social dominance orientation and team functioning. Analyses indicated that supervisor social dominance orientation was associated with increased within-team differentiation of leader-member exchange (LMX) relationships based on team members’ national origin. Such LMX differentiation (LMXD) was related to more within-team relationship conflict and in turn to reduced collective team commitment. The implications of these findings for research on supervisor social dominance orientation, within-team nationality diversity, and team functioning are discussed.

Exploring the Crabs in the Barrel Syndrome in Organizations

This article examines the existence of the crabs in the barrel syndrome (CBS) in organizational settings, as well as the affiliated intragroup, intergroup, and organizational dynamics. CBS is a metaphoric representation that describes the mentality and behaviors of in-group members that violate prescribed social norms of helping and support. Two qualitative studies are juxtaposed to capture the essence of CBS and associated socially complex issues that thrive in hypercompetitive and politicized work environments, resulting in negative collective and individual outcomes. This study provides a working definition of CBS and encourages further exploration of the phenomenon.

Leadership expectation gap and LMX quality: ethnic and nationality dissimilarities as moderator

Purpose

Demographically similar individuals often believe they are similar, in spite of the differences in values, beliefs and expectations. However, dissimilar dyads experience will encounter more interpersonal difficulties due to misunderstandings, misperceptions and conflicts of interest. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of leadership expectation gap on LMX quality and the moderating role of ethnic and nationality dissimilarity between manager and their superior on the relationship between leadership expectation gap and LMX quality.

Design/methodology/approach

This study adopted a quantitative research design. A purposive sampling survey of 137 lower-to middle-level managers working under the supervision of Malaysian and Japanese superiors in Japanese multi-national corporations was conducted to test the hypotheses of this study.

Findings

The study found the following: leadership expectation gap has a significant and negative effect on LMX quality; and ethnic dissimilarity and nationality dissimilarity moderates the relationship between leadership expectation gap and LMX quality.

Practical implications

There is a need for a comprehensive training programme for both leaders and followers, towards developing their interpersonal skills on how to work better and more effectively in the workplace. Furthermore, prior to the start of the expatriate assignment, organisations can help expatriate superiors to adapt themselves by providing pre-departure and cross-cultural training.

Originality/value

This paper addresses an important and not so well researched issue. It analyses the moderation effect of ethnic and nationality dissimilarity between manager and their superior on the relationship between leadership expectation gap on LMX quality in the Malaysian context.

Leader-member exchange and employee creativity

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to test the mediating role of LMX in the relationship between knowledge sharing and employee creativity and the extent to which this mediating role is moderated by transactional psychological contract.

Design/methodology/approach

A total of 286 employees working at the theme park in Taiwan and then analyzed using a structuring equation model with SPSS 12.0, LISREL 8.8 and SPSS PROCESS.

Findings

Results suggested that LMX mediated the relationship between knowledge sharing and employee creativity. Also, results suggested that transactional psychological contract moderated this mediating pathway: low transactional psychological contract increases the mediating role of LMX. Furthermore, the study showed that LMX can buffer the negative effects of transactional psychological contract on employee creative performance.

Originality/value

The originality of this study is to explore whether there is a moderated mediation model relationship among research variables and contributed to the LMX literature because there are few studies to discuss how knowledge sharing might stimulate creative outcome through LMX.