Out of the Box? How Managing a Subordinate’s Multiple Identities Affects the Quality of a Manager-Subordinate Relationship

Abstract

Positive manager-subordinate relationships are invaluable to organizations because they enable positive employee attitudes, citizenship behaviors, task performance, and more effective organizations. Yet, extant theory provides a limited perspective on the factors that create these types of relationships. In this paper, we highlight the important role that subordinates also play in affecting the resource pool and propose that a subordinate's multiple identities can provide him or her with access to knowledge and social capital resources that can be utilized for work-based tasks and activities. Yet, a manager and a subordinate may prefer similar or different strategies for managing the subordinate's multiple identities, which can affect resource utilization and the quality of the manager-subordinate relationship. Our variance model summarizes our predictions about the effect of managers' and subordinates' strategy choices on the quality of manager-subordinate relationships. In doing so we integrate three divergent relational theories (i.e., leader-member exchange theory, relational cultural theory, and a positive organizational scholarship perspective on positive relationships at work) and offer new insights on the quality of manager-subordinate relationships.