Organizational Citizenship Behavior of Information System Personnel: The Influence of Leader-Member Exchange

Background

Leader-member exchange (LMX) is a relationship-based approach to study leadership (Sherony & Green, 2002). The central premise behind LMX is that, within work units, unique and different types of relationships develop between leaders and subordinates. These relationships are characterized by degrees of physical or mental effort, material resources, information, and/or emotional support exchanged between these two parties. This contrasts greatly with domination methods that appear in the IS literature (Hussain & Cornelius, 2009). LMX is portrayed as one type of exchange that is part of a larger network of social exchanges, which include LMX, co-worker exchange, team-member-exchange, network exchange, and organization-member exchange. In this fashion, LMX represents a set of social approaches rather than a particular style category of leadership (Neufeld, Dong, & Higgins, 2007). Blau (1964) suggests that the basis of any exchange relationship can be described in terms of either social or economic principles and larger relational contexts surround and affect all dyadic exchanges where each exchange is based on a trust that gestures of goodwill will be reciprocated.