Research suggests that behaving in an ingratiatory manner towards one’s supervisor is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, ingratiation is a powerful tool through which employees develop positive social exchange relationships with target audiences (i.e., supervisors) and subsequently obtain desired outcomes at work. On the other hand, third party observers of ingratiation often view this behavior (and the people enacting it) in a negative manner, thereby hindering ingratiatory employees’ ability to develop high quality social exchange relationships with these individuals. However, this research primarily focuses on how organizational actors perceive of ingratiatory employees while neglecting the social context in which this behavior occurs. This is an important limitation because there are compelling reasons to believe that the social context plays a crucial role in how individuals react to ingratiation. Specifically, the social context may influence the extent to which ingratiation is salient, valued, and/or perceived as normative behavior by organizational members both within and external to the ingratiator-target dyad, which in turn affects how this behavior relates to relationship quality with the target and observers. The objective of my dissertation is to address this limitation by integrating a social context perspective with social exchange theory to build a “frog-pond” model of ingratiation. To that end, I propose that employees’ ingratiation relative to their team members, rather than absolute levels of ingratiation, drives positive exchange quality with supervisors. Furthermore, I hypothesize that congruence between the focal employee’s ingratiation and other team members’ ingratiation increases employees’ social exchange quality with team members. I also shed light on the asymmetrical nature of ingratiation (in)congruence by investigating how different types of congruence and incongruence impact social exchange quality with team members in different ways. In addition, I examine how relative ingratiation indirectly influences supervisors’ citizenship behavior toward the focal employee via focal employee-supervisor social exchange quality, as well as how ingratiation congruence indirectly affects team members’ citizenship behavior toward the focal employee through social exchange quality between the two parties. I test my hypotheses in a multi-wave multi-source field study of 222 employees and 64 teams/supervisors.

Constructive voice, the sharing of ideas or concerns that improve organizational functioning, is an important workplace behavior. Recent narrative reviews of constructive voice have highlighted the importance of accounting for different types of voice. Initial efforts to explain the type of constructive voice have focused on voice function, and distinguished constructive voice as promotive or prohibitive in nature. Yet, research findings regarding relationships between promotive and prohibitive voice and antecedents of constructive voice reveal inconsistencies that suggest that our theoretical understanding is incomplete. In this dissertation, I argue that in addition to distinguishing constructive voice as to its function (i.e., promotive voice and prohibitive voice), it is also important to distinguish constructive voice as to its scope (i.e., the number of different issues expressed by employees). By accounting for the function and scope of voice, I develop four specific types of constructive voice (i.e., championing, initiating, alarming, and patrolling) and conduct two studies wherein I establish construct validity and test differences in antecedent and outcome relationships with the specific types of voice. I first focus on scale development: generating items and assessing content validity. In Study 1, I test the factor structure of championing, initiating, alarming, and patrolling, and the nomological network of the measures. My second study is a field study of 251 employees in an insurance company and manufacturing facility. In Study 2 I test the criterion-related validity of the measures and explore the implications of voice scope. The research reported in my dissertation contributes to our understanding of constructive voice, and following from this, facilitates further theoretical and practical advances as to when employees who voice may be heard and when they may be tuned out.

This dissertation explores when and how the social comparisons that employees make with respect to their LMX (leader-member exchange) relationships affect their work performance and behaviors. The study introduces the concept of LMX social comparison across dyads (LMXAD) in which a follower compares the quality of his/her supervisory relationship to other leader-member dyads outside of the workgroup (e.g., my leader-myself vs. other leaders-other colleagues). Thus, the study sheds light on LMX social comparison processes at a dyadic level (e.g., our relationship vs. their relationships) as opposed to the individual level (e.g., my relationship vs their relationships, when followers share a same leader) to highlight the importance and saliency of leader-member dyadic comparisons. Drawing upon Thibaut & Kelley (1959)’s social exchange theory, the study, which collected data from 318 employees in Korean companies, empirically supported the positive effects of LMXAD on work performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and the negative effects of LMXAD on counterproductive work behavior (CWB), beyond LMX and LMX social comparison within group (e.g., my leader-myself vs. my leader-coworkers). Furthermore, results suggest upward counterfactual thoughts with regards to the current LMX relationship, mediates the relationship between LMXAD and work performance and CWB. Individual LMX and causal attributions also have a moderating effect by weakening the negative effects of LMXAD on upward counterfactual thoughts.