Making Your Enemies Feel Good About You: The Role of Machiavellianism in Unfavorable Leader-Member Exchange Comparison Processes

Presenter: Associate Professor Herman Tse (Monash University)

Abstract
Employees are always sensitive to their relative status in different leader-member exchanges (LMXs) through the comparison of their own LMXs with those of others in teams. Existing research has demonstrated that lower-LMX employees tend to emotionally distant from and even physically harm other higher-LMX coworkers in unfavorable comparison processes. Little research, however, has yet investigated whether lower-LMX employees can respond to the status-threat experience provoked by the higher-LMX coworkers differently. Drawing on the self-enhancement perspective of social comparison theory and the Machiavellianism (Mach) research, we developed a theoretical framework to investigate an important mechanism and condition under which the lower-LMX employees are motivated to engage in self-presentational acts toward the higher-LMX coworkers for affiliation. We tested the model in two independent studies across the Chinese and American cultural contexts, comprising a vignette-based experiment and a field survey to increase our findings’ confidence. Results from these studies consistently revealed that the lower-LMX employees are more likely to leverage their status-threat experience and display impression-management behavior toward the higher-LMX coworkers when their Mach is high rather than it is low. We also found that interpersonally impression-management behavior was positively associated with supervisor-rated impression-management behavior in teams.

Biography
Herman Tse is an Associate Professor of Leadership in the Department of Management, and is also the Director of the ECR Network at Monash Business School, Melbourne, Australia. He obtained his PhD from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Herman’s research interests include transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, emotions in teams and multilevel management issues. In recent years, his research has focused on studying the role of emotions in different types of interpersonal interactions among supervisors, subordinates and coworkers in work teams using new theoretical perspectives and methodological techniques.
Herman’s work has appeared in internationally respected journals such as the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Leadership Quarterly, the Journal of Organizational Behavior and the Human Resource Management. He is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Organizational Behavior and has also been on the editorial board of three journals including the Management Organization Review, the Journal of Business Research and the Leadership Quarterly.

Light lunch will be served so please advise of any dietary requirements.