Abstract:
Capitalizing upon Implicit Leadership Theories (ILTs) and Leader-member exchange (LMX), this research aims to explore the relationship between the congruence of employees‘ ILTs and those traits of their managers and employees‘ supportiveness, resistance and behavioral creativity for change. After distributing three questionnaires at three points among teachers, 296 participants completed all three questionnaires. Having conducted some confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs), we utilized Latent Congruence Modeling (LCM) to analyze the final proposed models. The findings showed that the congruence has no direct effects on behavioral change responses. However, LMX can function as a full mediator. LMX has significant relationships with employees‘ support and resistance for change. Nevertheless, the path coefficient was non-significant for behavioral creativity to change. This study, therefore, extends prevailing follower-centric perspective on leadership and strengthens its essence in organizational change with fundamental socio-cognitive research.
Machine summary:
Department of Accounting, Sirjan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Sirjan, Iran (Received: January 29, 2018; Revised: August 23, 2018; Accepted: September 16, 2018) Abstract exchange (LMX), this research aims to explore the relationship between the congruence of employees‘ ILTs and those traits of their managers and employees‘ supportiveness, resistance and behavioral creativity for change.
Implicit Leadership Theories, change behavior responses, LMX, congruence Corresponding Author, Email: ili_teacher@yahoo.
Social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) is a robust organizational behavior paradigm (Cropanzano & Mitchell, 2005) to provide justifications for followers‘ supportiveness to change.
e. the explicit form of ILTs in leaders) influenced supportive, creative and resistant behaviors of employees via positive affect and commitment to change.
The mediating role of LMX Under the conditions of change, it seems essential that followers access adaptive resources including personal support from managers, free-flowing information and reciprocate this relationship in order to fine-tune changes and sustain high levels of effort at work (Weick & Quinn, 1999, Caldwell et al.
Transformational leadership as a prototypical leadership has been shown as a behavioral style of leadership having a positive impact on continuous incremental organizational change through a high quality relationship (Carter et al.
Moreover, it is shown that LMX quality functions as a moderator for the relationship between managerial influence tactics and employee resistance to organizational change (Furst et al.
Specifically, high quality LMX can function as the mediator between the congruence of ILTs for current supervisor and a leader, on the one hand, and change behavior responses- supportiveness, resistance, and creative involvement, on the other hand.