Abstract
This PhD research offers a milestone towards building an intellectual project which would hopefully encourage further lines of scholarly inquiry within the domain of relational leadership and leadership development literature. This PhD research will contribute to the literature by extending LMX theory towards the inclusion of relational ambivalence drawing from the literature on social and interpersonal relationships, and ambivalence. The present research addresses the theoretical gap in the LMX literature by developing a theoretical framework of LMX ambivalence. The theoretical contribution will provide the conceptual clarity on underlying dimensions of LMX and provide the rationale for why the LMX relationship can be ambivalent. Drawing upon existing literature on LMX multidimensionality, the four dimensions of LMX, affect loyalty, perceived contribution and professional respect are used as the basis for experimental manipulation of LMX to induce LMX ambivalence. The Study 1 provided the empirical evidence for the antecedents of LMX ambivalence. This research also examined the impact of LMX ambivalence on a broad array of employee outcomes – organisational citizenship behaviour, supervisor targeted interpersonal deviance, and task performance. The empirical support was found for the association between LMX ambivalence and follower’s organisational citizenship behaviour and supervisor- targeted interpersonal deviance. Study 2 showed partial support for negative impact of LMX ambivalence on follower’s citizenship behaviour and study 3 showed support for positive impact of LMX ambivalence on supervisor-targeted interpersonal deviance behaviour. The research also investigated work-related trait rumination as a mediating mechanism to investigate how LMX ambivalence would impact followers’ outcome, and state affectivity as a boundary condition for the indirect path mediated through trait rumination. The moderated mediation analysis provided empirical support for the underlying mechanism and boundary condition for the effect of LMX ambivalence on follower’s organisational citizenship behaviour and supervisor-targeted interpersonal deviance. Theoretical and practical implication of findings of the research are discussed.