What will the boss think? The impression management implications of supportive relationships with star and project peers

Although impression management scholars have identified a number of tactics for influencing supervisor evaluations, most of those tactics represent supervisor-targeted behaviors. This study examines the degree to which employees form supportive relationships with peers for impression management purposes. In so doing, we explore this intriguing question: Will employees gain more from forming supportive relationships with stars (i.e., top performers who are on the fast track in the organization) or projects (i.e., works in progress who need help and refinement to perform well)? We examined this question in 2 field studies. Study 1 included 4 sources and 2 time periods; Study 2 included 2 sources and 3 time periods. The results showed that supportive relationships with both stars and projects seemed to represent impression management opportunities, insofar as they predicted supervisor positive affect and perceptions of employee promotability. Impression management motives only predicted supportive relationships with stars, however, not projects. Relationships with projects were driven by prosocial motives not concerns about managing images. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of our results for the managing of impressions and peer relationships

Leadership and organisational outcomes in healthcare

This research examined to what extent and how leadership is related to organisational outcomes in healthcare. Based on the Job Demands-Resource model, a set of hypotheses was developed, which predicted that the effect of leadership on healthcare outcomes would be mediated by job design, employee engagement, work pressure, opportunity for involvement, and work-life balance. The research focused on the National Health Service (NHS) in England, and examined the relationships between senior leadership, first line supervisory leadership and outcomes. Three years of data (2008 – 2010) were gathered from four data sources: the NHS National Staff Survey, the NHS Inpatient Survey, the NHS Electronic Record, and the NHS Information Centre. The data were drawn from 390 healthcare organisations and over 285,000 staff annually for each of the three years. Parallel mediation regressions modelled both cross sectional and longitudinal designs. The findings revealed strong relationships between senior leadership and supervisor support respectively and job design, engagement, opportunity for involvement, and work-life balance, while senior leadership was also associated with work pressure. Except for job design, there were significant relationships between the mediating variables and the outcomes of patient satisfaction, employee job satisfaction, absenteeism, and turnover. Relative importance analysis showed that senior leadership accounted for significantly more variance in relationships with outcomes than supervisor support in the majority of models tested. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical and practical contributions. They suggest that leadership plays a significant role in organisational outcomes in healthcare and that previous research may have underestimated how influential senior leaders may be in relation to these outcomes. Moreover, the research suggests that leaders in healthcare may influence outcomes by the way they manage the work pressure, engagement, opportunity for involvement and work-life balance of those they lead.

Frontline employees’ innovative service behavior as key to customer loyalty:insights into FLEs’ resource gain spiral

Many service firms require frontline service employees (FLEs) to follow routines and standardized operating procedures during the service encounter, to deliver consistently high service standards. However, to create superior, pleasurable experiences for customers, featuring both helpful services and novel approaches to meeting their needs, firms in various sectors also have begun to encourage FLEs to engage in more innovative service behaviors. This study therefore investigates a new and complementary route to customer loyalty, beyond the conventional service-profit chain, that moves through FLEs' innovative service behavior. Drawing on conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study introduces a resource gain spiral at the service encounter, which runs from FLEs' emotional job engagement to innovative service behavior, and then leads to customer delight and finally customer loyalty. In accordance with COR theory, the proposed model also includes factors that might hinder (customer aggression, underemployment) or foster (colleague support, supervisor support) FLEs' resource gain spiral. A multilevel analysis of a large-scale, dyadic data set that contains responses from both FLEs and customers in multiple industries strongly supports the proposed resource gain spiral as a complementary route to customer loyalty. The positive emotional job engagement-innovative service behavior relationship is undermined by customer aggression and underemployment, as hypothesized. Surprisingly though, and contrary to the hypotheses, colleague and supervisor support do not seem to foster FLEs' resource gain spiral. Instead, colleague support weakens the engagement-innovative service behavior relationship, and supervisor support does not affect it. These results indicate that if FLEs can solicit resources from other sources, they may not need to invest as many of their individual resources. In particular, colleague support even appears to serve as a substitute for FLEs' individual resource investments in the resource gain spiral.

Family supportive work environment, perceptions of the employment relationship and employee work outcomes

Data obtained from employed parents and their supervisors (N=230) in twelve South Korean organizations were used to test a model of the antecedents and outcomes of organizational social exchange. Structural equation modeling (SEM) results showed family supportive supervisor and perceived organizational family support to be related to organizational social exchange. Additionally, organizational social exchange was shown to be related to contextual performance and work withdrawal but indirectly through organization-based self-esteem. We discuss the implications of these findings for managing the employee-organization relationship in an increasingly diverse workforce.