leaders’ high levels of social support (Borchgrevink and Boster 1994).
Sparrowe’s (1994) paper examining antecedents and outcomes of empowerment
in a hospitality context found that organisational culture and LMX relationships
had positive and significant effects on employee empowerment levels. Sparrowe’s
research also found that employees reporting greater levels of empowerment
were more likely to be satisfied with promotional opportunities and less likely to
report an intention to leave their current job.
Testa’s (2009) study investigated the relationship between cultural congruence in
leader-member dyads, perceived leadership style, LMX and employee citizenship
behaviours. Along with several other of Testa’s leadership-related hospitality
publications (Testa 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007), this paper examines the influence
of cultural congruence/incongruence (situations where leader and member have
different nationalities) on leader-member relations.
Testa’s 2009 study used multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) to test for
relationships between organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB), initiating
structure and consideration, and the nature of LMX relationships. The results
showed that subordinates within congruent dyads reported higher levels of LMX
quality and organisational citizenship behaviours. Otherwise, while subordinates
in culturally congruent dyads reported greater perceived consideration-type
leadership behaviours, higher levels of initiating structure were not reported by
subordinates in culturally incongruent dyads.
Kim, S. et al. (2010) modelled the relationships between LMX quality, employee
envy and organisational citizenship behaviour (in particular, voluntary helping
behaviour towards co-workers). They found that low-quality LMX relationships
correlated with higher levels of employee envy and lower levels of voluntary
helping behaviours towards co-workers.
In the only non-USA study utilising LMX theory, Kim, B. et al. (2010) investigated
the relationship between LMX quality and turnover intent in South Korean hotels.
Their results showed that, for supervisory employees, there was a linear inverse
relationship between LMX quality and turnover intent (low LMX quality correlates
with higher turnover intent). For non-supervisory employees, however, a
curvilinear association between LMX quality and turnover intention was observed.
Specifically, non-supervisory employees with both low- and high-quality of LMX
tended to have higher levels of turnover intent. The authors speculate that it
may be the case that high-quality LMX relationships contribute to employee