Leader-Follower Interaction (ILF), LMX, OCB, Work Engagement, and Job Performance: A Follower-Centric Perspective
Although followership has been increasingly recognized as integral to organizational functioning, relatively few studies have systematically examined how specific leadership-followership configurations are associated with employee outcomes. Grounded in Social Exchange Theory and the integrative leadership-followership framework, this study adopts a follower-centred configurational analytical framework to examine the joint outcome implications of four leadership styles and four followership styles, forming 16 theoretically specified ILF configurations. Survey data from 308 Chinese employees across 10 industries were analysed using PLS-SEM to assess the associations of these configurations with leader-member exchange (LMX), organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), work engagement (WEng), and job performance (JP), as well as the serial indirect pathways through LMX and OCB or WEng. The findings showed that only a subset of the 16 configurations was significantly associated with the outcomes and that the direction of these associations varied across specific pairings. In particular, Passion followership combined with Democratic leadership was positively associated with LMX, OCB, WEng, and JP. Passion followership combined with Autocratic leadership was negatively associated with JP, whereas its combination with Transformational leadership was negatively associated with all four outcomes. The serial indirect pathway through LMX and OCB was significant for four configurations, whereas the corresponding pathway through LMX and WEng was not supported. These findings advance a configurational understanding of leader-follower effectiveness by showing that leadership and followership styles do not operate independently or uniformly and that LMX functions as a configuration-contingent relational mechanism. Future research should test the framework in other cultural contexts with additional leadership-followership configurations.
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