Leader Member Exchange Theory

It’s the era of 21st century and a decade and half of it is already passed. The idea of leadership is as old as man’s life and human civilization. For decades the leadership has been the source of various noticeable studies and much research has been done on this particular domain. Theories of leadership are developing and evolving since 1840’s with the occurrence of Great man theory, trait theories (1940’s-1950) and then contingency theories (1960’s), transactional and transformation theory of leadership (1970’s). From many centuries, all these leadership theories are an important resource of learning in reality as well as in practice. The prominent researchers and scholars of past and present time have

This study clearly stated the perspective of Leader Member Exchange Theory. The fundamental thought about the leader-member exchange theory is that the leaders make two groups i.e. in-group and out-group of their followers. The members of in-groups are given huge responsibilities, many rewards, and more attention than others. They are given some freedom by the leaders. They are kept in the leader’s private circle. Contrastingly, members of out-group are out of the leader’s inner league. They are given less attention and less rewards and are given prescribed policy and rules. Another work on Leader Member Exchange theory was done by Hui Wang in 2005 developed a model in the paper. They showed that leader-member exchange (LMX) is mediated between supposed and expected transformational leadership attitudes and subordinates’ performance and organizational citizenship behaviours. Hui Wang and fellows found out that a successful leader always presents a dynamic transformational behaviour to his subordinates and followers. Leaders encourage followers to participate and chip in their task by actively participating to exchange their ideas and thoughts to make a socially bonded relationship. Another study was conducted on relationship of principals and student counsellors in 2009. Cashwell and his fellows used Leader Member Exchange theory for this study. They claimed that principals have

in-house assumptions, root metaphor assumptions, paradigm assumptions, ideology assumptions and field assumptions. According to this, first assumption is that if a subordinate works in closeness with the leader it gets benefits and enters in the in-group of leader. According to LMX theory, that subordinate becomes the “pet” of the leader. Contrary to this, those subordinate who work being at a certain distance from the leader they are actually those who are in out-group of leader and they are not given much handsome rewards and favors. They are considered to be the hard-cores in terms of leadership. Another assumption regarding and identified this domain is that expected transformational leadership attitudes and subordinates’ performance and organizational citizenship behaviours is mediated by good leader and member interaction. The communication between subordinate and leader is responsible for better organizational citizenship behaviours and leadership. Subordinates are appreciated by the leader to contribute to the organization’s welfare by sharing their ideas. One of other assumptions is that the leaders have significant control on shaping the role and personalities of the subordinates and followers