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Examining The Effects Of Lmx Differentiation And Leaders' Relationships With Key Members On Teams: A Social Networks Approach, Chen Wang

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A key assumption in the leader-member exchange (LMX) literature is that leaders struggle with developing and maintaining high-quality exchange relationships with all of their members. As a natural consequence, leaders typically develop high-quality relationships with a select few of their followers while maintaining formal and distant relationships with others. Such differentiated relationships in teams may have negative consequences, and this dissertation examines how LMX differentiation impacts team performance by creating task and relationship conflict. Furthermore, this dissertation advances theory on LMX differentiation by arguing that not all kinds of differentiation are the same. Specifically, drawing from the literature on social …