OLS-57900 Week 7 - Leader-Member Exchange Theory
Key Takeaway 1: If you take care of your employees, they'll take care of the customer (Anderson, 2023). I believe this concept is the foundation of Leader-member Exchange (LMX) theory, which centers leadership on the interactions between leaders and followers. Research shows that high-quality leader-member exchanges produced less employee turnover, more positive performance evaluations, higher frequency of promotions, greater organizational commitment, more desirable work assignments, better job attitudes, more attention and support from leaders, greater participation, and faster career progress over 25 years (Northouse, 2019). Thus, it is important to remember throughout your leadership journey that you shouldn't only focus on success. You have to care, as depicted in Exhibit 1, to achieve your optimal potential (Anderson, 2023).
Key Takeaway 2: Emotions play a critical role in the development of high-quality leader-member relationships (Northouse, 2019). The stronger the LMX, the more emotionally committed both the leader and follower are to the outcome (see Exhibit 2). It is out of this emotional commitment - this caring from both leader and follower - that generates the most benefit.
Key Takeaway 3: Focus on what you can control. When you take ownership, you're there to solve the problem. People in victim mode are always waiting for external circumstances to change. Happiness is a choice. Focus on actions, solutions, and figuring it out (Anderson, 2023). You ever see impoverished people / families enjoying themselves while wealthy people / families seem miserable? Because happiness is a choice... Life is about perspective (for both happiness and success) and happiness is defined differently for each individual. Having been born in poverty in the Philippines and now living a higher household income life in the United States, I can assert that my happiness has been consistent because my perspective of happiness revolves around family, laughing, and feeling loved and supported (i.e., being cared for) - things that are available to you if you choose them, regardless of your household income.
Exhibit 1: The Law of Value
Exhibit 2: Pattern of Shared Emotion Over Time
Analysis: I agree that caring creates stronger engagement and that engagement increases output resulting in better outcomes. However, to say that you must engage all of your staff in addition to those outside of your staff is not pragmatically feasible. I supervise 25 engineers as their career manager, mentor another 6 as their job leader, and engage other leaders and staff across a firm of 30K+ people to solve problems. Thus, I agree with the research referenced by Northouse (2019) that strict adherence to LMX can be counterproductive specifically as it pertains to scale. To this point of scale, I don't think it's realistic to expect that you can get everybody into the "in-group". I don't know how personal preference and bias does not come into play as those that better align to your personality, values, etc. are going to naturally be easier for you to engage and establish strong LMX. Thus, those in the "in-group" end up benefitting from your personal preferences and bias while those in the "out-group" suffer from missed opportunities simply because they happen to fall outside of your comfort zone of engagement.
Application: Acknowledging that it is harder to scale LMX and engage those that may not perfectly align to my personality and preferences, there is still a lot of value in engaging my team. With a 25 person team, I only have strong LMX with a select few. The preference I exhibit is that those select few are ones I work directly with. The remaining staff fall into the the Stage 1: Stranger relationship as they are cross-matrixed to other projects so I only talk with them for 30 minutes every month or two, depending on the indvidicual's cadence. I need to do a better job of transitioning from Phase 1 stranger phase to Phase 2 acquaintence phase. While this may not land everybody in the "in-group", it will strengthen our bonds, which will being the process of synchronizing our emotions through the definition of a common goal which will then bring in the other benefits such as improved loyalty, satisfaction, etc.
References
Anderson, R. M. (2023). Leadership Mindset 2.0. Columbia: Executive Joy! https://rmichaelanderson.com/leadership-mindset-2-0/
Northouse, P. G. (2019). Leadership: Theory and Practice 8th Edition. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.