Summary: | 碩士 === 國立東華大學 === 企業管理學系 === 100 === In leadership theories, leader-member exchange theory (LMX theory) is one of the most important for many years. LMX theory has developed over 30 years and accumulated many empirical research results which proved that supervisors’ leadership styles evidently influences employees’ career development. The main purpose of LMX theory is to illustrate the relationship developmental process between supervisor and employee. A supervisor develops different relationships with different employees, thus employees may classify themselves as in-group or out-group members according to the relationship quality that they perceived. Contrary to out-group members, in-group members usually get abundant resources and supports from their supervisor. However, this study proposes that there are more sophisticated ways to classify employee roles in a work group. Accordingly, using two dimensions--LMX quality and role overload, this study attempts to classify employee roles into four types: (A) high quality-high dedication relationship, (B) high quality-low dedication relationship, (C) low quality-high dedication relationship, (D) low quality-low dedication relationship. Furthermore, this study attempts to probe how the perceived leader favoritism and perceived organizational justice influence employees’ expectations on career development.
This study adopted the survey method to collect data from 103 branch stores in a real estate company in Taipei city and New Taipei city. Questionnaires were distributed at two time periods. The first period distributed 434 questionnaires which measured employee role variables and employee perceptions (the mediating variables), and the second period distributed 339 questionnaires which included outcome variables. A total of 323 questionnaires were valid. This study adopted multivariate analysis of variance to examine four types of employees’ perceptions on leader favoritism and organizational justice. Moreover, this study used multiple regression analysis to examine the relationship between mediating variables and outcome variables.
The findings show that: (1) the four types of employees have different perceptions. First, the employees in low quality-low dedication relationship (D) have significantly higher perceived leader favoritism than the employees in high quality-low dedication relationship (B). Second, employees in high quality-low dedication relationship (B) have significantly higher distributive justice than employees in high quality- high dedication relationship (A), in low quality- high dedication relationship (C), and in low quality- low dedication relationship, which means the last three types of employees perceive higher distributive injustice than those in high quality-low dedication relationship (B). Third, employees in high LMX quality group (both high quality- high dedication relationship (A) and high quality-low dedication relationship (B)) have significantly higher procedural justice than those in low LMX quality group (both low quality-high dedication relationship (C) and low quality-low dedication relationship (D)), which means low LMX quality group perceive higher procedural injustice. (2) The more serious the leader favoritism that employees perceive, the higher their turnover intentions, and the more pessimistic about their own career success. The more serious the distributive injustice and procedural injustice that employees perceive, the higher their turnover intentions, and the more pessimistic about their own career success.
These results indicate that different types of employees have different perceptions on supervisors’ management, which may influence employees’ career development in the future. In practice, managers should notice different employees’ psychological conditions and adopt different management methods based on employees’ role characteristics.
|