The Dual Processes of Leader-Member Exchange Social Comparison

Research on leader-member exchange social comparison (LMXSC) has shown that it is almost always beneficial for employees. Drawing from social information processing theory and social comparison theory, we depart from this predominant view and suggest that LMXSC can be a mixed blessing. For employees with high psychological entitlement, LMXSC more strongly enhances perceptions of distributive, procedural, and interactional justice, thereby boosting job performance and organizational citizenship behaviors directed at individuals (OCBI). Conversely, for employees with high interdependent self-construal, LMXSC more easily triggers concerns about social-relational threats (CSRT), leading to a decline in job performance while simultaneously compelling them to engage in more OCBI. Data from a multi-wave field study involving supervisor-subordinate-coworker triads conducted in China largely supported our hypotheses. Finally, we discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.