Leadership and solidarity behaviour. Consensus in perception of employees within teams
| Date | 01 September 2006 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480610682280 |
| Pages | 538-556 |
| Published date | 01 September 2006 |
| Author | Karin Sanders,Birgit Schyns |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour |
Leadership and solidarity
behaviour
Consensus in perception of employees
within teams
Karin Sanders
Work and Organisation Psychology, University of Twente, Enschede,
The Netherlands, and
Birgit Schyns
University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Abstract
Purpose – This study focuses on the relationship between cohesion, consensus in the perception of
leadership style of the supervisor within teams and solidarity behaviour of employees towards their
supervisor (vertical solidarity behaviour) and towards other team members (horizontal solidarity
behaviour).
Design/methodology/approach – According to the self-categorisation theory, which elaborates on
the social identity theory, hypotheses for the relationship between consensus in perception within
teams, cohesiveness within the teams and vertical and horizontal solidarity behaviour of employees
were formulated. The hypotheses were tested in a study with 193 employees within 35 teams in a
Dutch Ministry.
Findings – As expected, consensus in leaders’ perception and cohesiveness within the team were
positively related for transformational leadership style. Results from multi-level analyses showed,
as expected, a positive relationship between cohesiveness and horizontal solidarity behaviour.
For vertical solidarity behaviour an interaction effect was found: the relationship between
cohesiveness and vertical solidarity behaviour is positive if employees perceive their supervisor as
high transformational, but is slightly negative if employees perceive their supervisor as low
transformational.
Research limitations/implications – The finding that consensus in transformational leader’s
perception within teams is related to the cohesiveness of a team support the self-categorization theory.
On the other hand cohesiveness is only related to vertical solidarity behaviour when the supervisor is
perceived as high transformational.
Originality/value – The different results mean that it make sense todistinguish between horizontal
and vertical solidarity behaviour. In addition, they show the impact of consensus in the perception of
leadership style on cohesion.
Keywords Leadership, Employee behaviour, Teammanagement
Paper type Research paper
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at
www.emeraldinsight.com/0048-3486.htm
This paper was presented at the International Conference Innovating HRM? 7 and 8 November
2003, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Theme 2. Innovating the employment relationship.
The authors want to thank Deanne den Hartog, George Graen, and the participants of the session
in Twente for the valuable comments on an earlier version of this paper. Karin Sanders worked
on this paper during a visit at the University of New South Wales (School of Industrial Relations
and Organisational Behaviour), in Sydney, Australia.
PR
35,5
538
Personnel Review
Vol. 35 No. 5, 2006
pp. 538-556
qEmerald Group Publishing Limited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/00483480610682280
1. Introduction
In order to react on changes on the outlet market, responsibility for attaining
production goals within organisations are transferred to teams (Cohen and Bailey,
1997; Goodman, 1986). Within these teams, employees enjoy a considerable amount of
autonomy and perform challenging tasks. The flip side of this autonomy is that
employees have to cooperate with their team members and their supervisors to keep
the organisation running (Appelbaum and Batt, 1994; Handy, 1995; Wickens, 1995).
Cooperation can be referred as the contribution of individual effort, time and resources
to interdependent tasks and actions that benefit the group or organisation (Smith et al.,
1995; Katz, 1964; Katz and Kahn, 1966).
It is, however, not self evident that employees within organisations cooperate.
Cooperative behaviour within organisations exemplifies the free rider problem: it is
tempting to employees to lean back, relax, and hitchhike on the work of others
(Kerr, 1983; Organ, 1988). But if all employees within an organisation act in such an
opportunistic way, tasks and projects may fail and the goals of the organisation will
not be served. In respect to this, cooperative behaviour of employees is seen as one of
the most important success factors within modern organisations (Wickens, 1995).
Given the importance of cooperation to the effective functioning of organisation, it
is crucial to understand what factors motivate employees to cooperate within
organisations. In this paper, we focus on a factor that may be of particular importance
in this respect: the leadership style of the supervisor (Bass, 1990; Avolio and Bass,
2002; De Cremer and Van Vugt, 2002; De Cremer and Van Knippenberg, 2002; Van
Knippenberg and Hogg, 2003). In leadership styles often a distinction is made between
transformational and transactional leadership styles (Bass, 1985, 1990; Avolio and
Bass, 2002). According to Bass (1990, p. 53) transformational leaders ask followers to:
... transcend their own self-interests for the good of the group, organisation or society, to
consider their long-term needs to develop themselves, rather than their needs of the moment;
and to become what is really important.
Empirical research shows that transformational leadership is highly effective in terms
of commitment and motivation (Lowe et al., 1996). Transactional leadership refers to
“the exchange relationship between leaders and followers to meet their own
self-interest” (Bass, 1990, p. 10). It can be considered as effective as well, although the
performance related to this leadership is lower than the one related to transformational
leadership (Hater and Bass, 1988). In this paper, because of the different effect of
transformational and transactional leadership style we will focus mainly on the effects
of transformational leadership style of supervisor.
Because we assume that cooperative behaviour is characterised by a norm of
reciprocity (Gouldner, 1960; Hechter, 1987), and since employee-employee and
employee-supervisor are qualitatively different relationships (Smith et al., 1995), we
distinguish cooperative behaviour to team-members from cooperative behaviour to the
supervisor. We refer to these two kinds of behaviours as horizontal (to team members)
and vertical (to the supervisor) solidarity behaviour of employees. The relationship
between leadership style and the supervisor-employee relationship is studied before
(Podsakoff et al., 1990; Podsakoff et al., 1996a, b; Podsakoff et al., 1993; and the LMX
research, Graen and Uhl-Bien, 1995), but research on the relationship between
leadership styles and horizontal solidarity behaviour is rare. In this paper, we examine
Leadership and
solidarity
behaviour
539
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