A gender perspective on entrepreneurial leadership:female leaders in Kazakhstan

The paper proposes a conceptual model to understand female entrepreneurial leadership through an exploration of the perceptions and experiences of women entrepreneurs within their leadership roles. The paper addresses an existing knowledge gap on entrepreneurial leadership by bringing together three key constructs of gender, leadership and entrepreneurship. We apply Stewart's model of role demands-constraints-choices (DCC) to women entrepreneurs in Kazakhstan in order to understand their perceptions of the demands, constraints and choices they experience within their leadership roles. The results of in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs present deeper conceptualization of their leadership enactment as a co-developing, co-constructed relational activity between leaders and others in their wider business environments and context

A multi-level analysis of team climate and interpersonal exchange relationships at work

This paper seeks to advance research on interpersonal exchange relationships between supervisors, subordinates, and coworkers at work by integrating social exchange, workplace friendship, and climate research to develop a multi-level model. We tested the model using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) with data obtained from a sample of 215 manager–employee dyads working in 36 teams. At the individual level, leader–member exchange (LMX) was found to be related to workplace friendship. Further, workplace friendship was positively related to team–member exchange (TMX) and mediated the LMX–TMX relationship. At the team level, HLM results indicated that the relationship between LMX and workplace friendship was moderated by affective climate. These findings suggest that high-quality LMX relationships are associated with enhanced workplace friendship between employees, especially when the affective climate is strong

Critique and Review of Leader-Member Exchange Theory: Issues of Agreement, Consensus, and Excellence

The relationship quality that develops between leaders and those designated as followers is of longstanding interest to researchers and practitioners. The purpose of the present article is to review the more recent developments in the field of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory to identify specific issues related to leader-member agreement and follower consensus that have potentially important theoretical and practical implications. We introduce the concept of LMX excellence, which involves high-quality LMX, high leader-member agreement as well as high group consensus in LMX quality. We outline how leaders and followers' behaviour as well as context can enhance or hinder the development of LMX excellence and conclude with an overview of the practical and theoretical implications as well as future research needs

The When and Why: Student Entrepreneurial Aspirations

Although connections between university enterprise courses and entrepreneurial activity have been examined, less work has investigated the intended timing of future entrepreneurial activities. Using data from a survey of U.K. business students, it is found that those intending to enter entrepreneurship right away place less emphasis on avoiding stress and responsibility, seeing themselves as natural leaders. They were also more confident of succeeding, but not because of superior knowledge. A greater emphasis on entrepreneurial activities in all institutional environments, including the corporate, may help balance the need to harness enthusiasm while it lasts with the need to acquire relevant experience

Mutual trust between leader and subordinate and employee outcomes

Stable and enduring cooperative relationships among people are primarily based on mutual trust. However, little evidence exists about the effects of mutual trust between supervisor and subordinate on work outcomes. To understand better the dynamics of trust in supervisor–subordinate relationships, we examined how mutual trust between supervisor and subordinate is associated with work outcomes. Based on a sample of 247 subordinate–supervisor pairs, multilevel analyses revealed a positive effect of perceived mutual trust on task performance and interpersonal facilitation after controlling for trust in leader and felt trust. In addition, task performance and interpersonal facilitation increased as trust in leader and felt trust or trust in subordinate both increased

The relationship of work unit contextual factors to leader-member exchange: A multi-level theoretical and empirical investigation

The Leader-Member Exchange model (LMX) has not been adequately explored via multi-level analysis, even though its propositions warrant such examination. The theory has been proposed to have both within-group effects as well as between-group effects. Also, the relationship between LMX and performance has been equivocal, and researchers have called for the exploration of moderating variables to understand these conflicting findings. Therefore, the purpose of this dissertation is (a) to examine the inconsistencies between LMX and performance by including situational factors and (b) to explore these relationships from a multiple levels perspective.Four contextual variables were included in this study on the basis of a review of situational leadership theories and the LMX literature: work unit size, cohesiveness, climate (operationalized with measures of conflict vs. cooperation, autonomy, skill variety, supportiveness, and social relations following from the James and James, 1992, conceptualization of psychological climate), and leader power (operationalized with measures of expert, referent, legitimate, reward, and coercive power following from the French & Raven, 1959, conceptualization of power).Direct effects were found for the relationships of cohesiveness and all climate variables with LMX. Average work unit cohesiveness was also related to variance in LMX quality. Cohesiveness moderated the relationship between LMX and performance. Conflict vs. cooperation moderated the relationship between LMX and satisfaction with supervisor-human relations. Autonomy moderated the relationship between LMX and job satisfaction and LMX and satisfaction with supervisor-human relations. Skill variety moderated the relationship between LMX quality and satisfaction with supervisor-technical ability. The last climate variable to interact with LMX was supportiveness, which moderated the relationship between LMX and job satisfaction and the LMX/satisfaction with supervisor-technical ability relationship. Coercive power moderated the relationship between LMX and both satisfaction with supervisor dependent variables.Noteworthy in this research is that several of the relationships found would have been masked if raw score analyses alone had been conducted, underscoring the need for both theorizing and testing of relationships at multiple levels. Second, the majority of the relationships analyzed revealed that effects occurred at both within- and between-group levels, highlighting the fact that both the traditional Average Leadership Style approach as well as the LMX conceptualization of leadership occurred concurrently in work units.Thus, the current research expanded the LMX framework to include situational variables previously omitted, and demonstrated that contextual factors do have an effect on the LMX relationship that develops as well as on the outcomes of this relationship.</p

Development and Application of a New Approach to Testing the Bipolarity of Semantic Differential Items

A new method of testing semantic differential scales for bipolarity is developed, using a new conceptualization of bipolarity that does not require unidimensionality. Using 63 subjects and multidimensional scaling (MDS) procedures, the investigation assessed Fiedler's Least Preferred Coworker (LPC) instrument and revealed it to suffer significant departures from bipolarity in 9 of 10 tested bipolar pairs. Future research implications are discussed

Construct validation in leadership research: Explication and illustration

The field of leadership typically employs constructs—variables that cannot be directly measured—in its research. Yet, our measures are rarely subjected to systematic assessment of their construct validity. This paper presents arguments about the importance of the construct validation process and illustrates why such concerns are well founded by examining the most commonly used measure of subordinate-perceived leader–member exchange, the LMX-7 scale. Using bakery workers ( N = 379) and employed MBA students ( N = 350), discriminant validity was investigated by exploratory factor analysis in the first sample, confirmatory factor analysis in the second sample, and correlation and multiple regression analysis in a subset of the second sample ( N = 220). The results suggested poor subordinate LMX-7 discriminant validity and that subordinate LMX-7 scores were substantially predicted by measures of supportive leadership and supervisor satisfaction ( R 2 = .71). Implications for future LMX theory and research are discussed as well as the types of construct validity evidence that we need to gather on our research instruments before and while they are employed in substantive studies of leadership phenomena