Leader Responsiveness

LEADER RESPONSIVENESS, EQUITYSENSITIVITY, AND EMPLOYEE ATTITUDES

AND BEHAVIOR

Ted ShoreCalifornia State University, San Marcos

Thomas Sy

Judy StraussCalifornia State University, Long Beach

ABSTRACT: This study investigated the relationships between leader respon-siveness to employee requests and employee attitudes and behaviors in a sampleof managers and their subordinates. Additionally, the study investigated themoderating effect of an individual difference variable (equity sensitivity), on therelationships between leader responsiveness and employee attitudes andbehaviors. Leader responsiveness related significantly with job satisfaction,organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior. Further-more, equity sensitivity moderated the relationships between leader respon-siveness and job satisfaction. Entitleds reported lower job satisfaction whenmanager fulfillment of employee requests was low than did Benevolents, whereasdifferences were minimal when manager request fulfillment was high. Implica-tions of the findings were discussed.

KEY WORDS: leader responsiveness; equity sensitivity.

INTRODUCTION

Employee attitudes and behaviors have occupied the attention oforganizational scholars and practitioners for decades (e.g., Locke, 1976).Numerous studies including meta-analyses (e.g., Mathieu & Zajac, 1990)and literature reviews (see Meyer & Allen, 1997; Spector, 1997 for recent

Address correspondence to Ted Shore, College of Business Administration, CaliforniaState University, San Marcos, 333 S. Twin Oaks Valley Rd, , San Marcos, CA, 92096 USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Journal of Business and Psychology, Vol. 21, No. 2, Winter 2006 (�2006)DOI: 10.1007/s10869-006-9026-5

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0889-3268/06/1200-0227/0 � 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc.

reviews) have examined various employee work attitudes. Because oftheir criticality to organizational effectiveness (e.g., Ostroff, 1992) thereis a need to learn more about the antecedents of employee work attitudesand behaviors. In the current study, social exchange (e.g., Blau, 1964)and equity theories (e.g., Adams, 1965) converge to explain the impact ofone situational variable (leader responsiveness to employee requests)and one individual difference variable (equity sensitivity) on work atti-tudes and behaviors.

In the current study, we first examine direct relationships betweenone type of employee/manager exchange (responsiveness to employeerequests) and employee attitudes and behaviors. We believe that requestfulfillment represents an important but neglected component of themanager/subordinate relationship. A second purpose of the current studyis to explore how equity sensitivity moderates the relationships betweenleader responsiveness to employee requests and employee attitudes andbehaviors. Equity sensitivity is derived from recent extensions of equitytheory (Adams, 1965), and posits that individuals vary in their reactionsto situations involving perceived equity or inequity (Huseman, Hatfield,& Miles, 1985, 1987). To date, no known studies have investigated theinteractive relationships between the employee/manager exchange rela-tionship, equity sensitivity, and employee attitudes and behaviors.

Social Exchange Theory: Leader Responsiveness to Employee Requests

Social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) provides a general frameworkfor understanding how employee perceptions of leader responsiveness torequests impacts employee attitudes and behaviors. The theory positsthat a norm of reciprocity develops between individuals in organizations(Gouldner, 1960; Rousseau, 1989). According to the norm of reciprocity, apattern of reciprocal obligation develops when one party provides an-other with a benefit. To date, research on social exchange has been silenton the issue of who initiates the exchange between the employee andmanager (Eisenberger, Stinglhamber, Vandenberghe, Sucharski, &Rhoades, 2002; Kottke & Sharafinski, 1988). Unlike other types of ex-change in which the employee may be a relatively passive participant(i.e., receive rewards without asking), in the current study we areinterested in leaders’ responsiveness when employees initiate the ex-change process by making requests for particular benefits (e.g., promo-tion) and/or desired resources (e.g., training opportunity).

Prior research has not investigated how employees react whenmanagers grant, deny or ignore their requests for various benefits andresources. It is likely that the manager’s response to their subordinate’srequests over time will affect employees’ sense of fairness and sub-sequent attitudes and behaviors (Folger & Greenberg, 1985). Thus, we

JOURNAL OF BUSINESS AND PSYCHOLOGY228

expect that when managers respond favorably to employee requests, thiswill result in subordinate attitudes and behaviors which enhance theemployee/manager relationship. Conversely, a negative (or lack of)response to employee requests should result in attitudes and behaviorscounter to a favorable relationship. Our rationale for this prediction isthat employees are most likely to initiate requests for things that matterto them and to view their manager’s response as indicative of their valueto the manager and organization. Therefore, denial of a request(s) islikely to have an even greater negative impact on an employee’s atti-tudes/behaviors than when employees fail to receive benefits they neverrequested. Our rationale is supported by researchers who have arguedthat positive discretionary actions by the organization are seen byemployees as evidence that the organization cares about their well-being(Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa, 1986; Shore & Shore,1995). Since the manager is often a source of discretionary rewards suchas salary increases, bonuses, and training opportunities (e.g., Wayne,Shore, & Liden, 1997), we argue that when managers respond favorablyto employee requests (a discretionary act), employees are likely todevelop a favorable perception of the manager’s concern for their well-being, resulting in favorable work attitudes/behaviors (e.g., Uhl-Bien,Graen, & Scandura, 2000).

The current study tests the relationships between leader respon-siveness to employee requests and work attitudes (job satisfaction,organizational commitment, and turnover intention) as well as workbehaviors (organizational citizenship behavior, and job performance).These work attitudes and behaviors were selected as our focus due totheir prominent role in organizational research. Given the lack of priorempirical research on leader responsiveness, we rely on the theoreticalframework presented above as well as empirical evidence from the socialexchange literature to support our hypotheses. Studies have shown thatperceptions of a positive exchange relationship have been found to relateto job satisfaction (e.g., Masterson, Lewis, Goldman, & Taylor, 2000),organizational commitment (e.g., Liden, Sparrowe, & Wayne, 1997;Manogram & Conlon, 1993; Rhoades, Eisenberger, & Armeli, 2001), andturnover intentions (e.g., Eisenberger et al., 2002; Manogram & Conlon,1993; Wayne et al., 1997). Research also has found evidence that thequality of the relationship between the manager and subordinate isrelated to organizational citizenship behavior (e.g., Manogram & Conlon,1993; Masterson et al., 2000; Wayne et al., 1997) and job performance(Liden et al., 1997; Wayne et al., 1997; Wayne, Shore, Bommer, &Tetrick, 2002). Thus, based on theory as well as empirical support for therelationships between manager/subordinate exchange and workattitudes and behaviors, we expect the following:

T. SHORE, T. SY, AND J. STRAUSS 229

Hypothesis 1: Leader responsiveness to employee requests will relatepositively to job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organiza-tional citizenship behavior, and job performance, and negatively toturnover intention.

Equity Sensitivity

In addition to evaluating direct effects of leader responsiveness onwork attitudes and behaviors, this study investigates the moderatingeffect of equity sensitivity on those relationships. Equity theory is rootedin the idea of social exchange and suggests that individuals developperceptions of how fairly they are treated by comparing their outcomesand inputs to that of relevant others (Adams, 1965). Equity theory hasbeen criticized for failing to recognize that individual differences exist inhow individuals perceive and react to situations involving equity (e.g.,Vecchio, 1981). Consequently, Huseman et al. (1985, 1987) proposed theconcept of equity sensitivity in which individuals have differentialreactions to situations involving perceived equity or inequity. Accordingto their theory, there are three types of individuals. Benevolent individ-uals are described as ‘‘givers’’ who dislike being on the receiving end of asocial exchange (Greenberg & Westcott, 1983; Huseman et al., 1985,1987). Entitled individuals, on the other hand, prefer to be on thereceiving end of a social exchange, and focus mainly on maximizing theiroutcomes (e.g., pay) (Huseman et al., 1987; King, Miles, & Day, 1993).They have been described as ‘‘getters’’ (Huseman et al., 1987) who have asense of ‘‘entitlement’’ and a high threshold for feeling indebted(Greenberg & Westcott, 1983). Equity Sensitive individuals fall betweenthese two extremes and are believed to adhere to traditional equitytheory tenets, having a preference for equality between their outcome/input ratios and that of others.

A number of empirical studies have demonstrated that equity sen-sitivity predicts a variety of work outcomes. For example, research hasshown that Benevolents receive higher ratings on job performance (Bing& Burroughs, 2001), report greater organizational commitment and jobsatisfaction, and lower levels of intentions to leave the organization (e.g.,King & Miles, 1994) than Entitleds. Benevolents have also demonstrateda willingness to work harder for the same or less pay (Miles, Hatfield, &Huseman, 1989), and scored higher on organizational citizenshipbehavior than Entitleds (Kickul & Lester, 2001). Furthermore, studieshave found that Benevolents place greater emphasis on intrinsic out-comes, whereas Entitleds emphasize extrinsic outcomes (Miles et al.,1989; Miles, Hatfield, & Huseman, 1994). Benevolents have also beenfound to be more tolerant of inequity (Huseman et al., 1985; King et al.,


1993; Shore, 2004) and have less negative affect toward the organization(Kickul & Lester, 2001) than Entitleds.

Two studies have investigated the possible interaction betweenequity sensitivity and other organizational variables. O’Neill and Mone(1998) found that equity sensitivity moderated the relationship betweenself-efficacy and several work attitudes, and Kickul and Lester (2001)reported an interaction between equity sensitivity and psychologicalcontract breaches of intrinsic and extrinsic outcomes. In the currentstudy, we expect individuals who receive few fulfilled requests from theirmanager (low leader responsiveness) and have an entitled orientation tohave less favorable work attitudes and behaviors than individuals with abenevolent orientation. Since Entitleds expect more than Benevolents ingeneral (Greenberg & Westcott, 1983; Huseman et al., 1985, 1987), theyare expected to react more negatively (i.e., feel unfairly treated) whentheir requests are not granted. By contrast, since Benevolents havegreater tolerance for under-reward (Huseman et al., 1985; King & Miles,1994; King et al., 1993; Miles et al., 1994; Shore, 2004), they should reactless negatively to unfulfilled requests. On the other hand, when themanager is highly responsive, Entitleds and Benevolents should notdiffer significantly in their work attitudes and behaviors. Empirical re-search has shown that highly rewarded Benevolents and Entitleds aremore satisfied than when they are under-rewarded (Miles et al., 1994;Shore, 2004). Therefore, for Entitleds we expect that work attitudes andbehaviors will be more favorable when leader responsiveness is highthan when it is low. By contrast, for Benevolents we expect that workattitudes and behaviors will be relatively unaffected (i.e., uniformly high)by the level of leader responsiveness. Thus, we hypothesize that:

Hypothesis 2 : Leader responsiveness will have a more positive impacton job satisfaction, organizational commitment, organizational citi-zenship behavior, and job performance, and a more negative impact onturnover intentions for Entitleds than for Benevolents.

METHODS

Sample and Procedures

The sample consisted of 231 managers (198 men, 33 women) and 339of their subordinates (274 men, 65 women) working for a large multi-national transportation firm in the southeastern United States. Man-agers rated between one and nine employees each, but the majority (81%)rated only one employee. Managers and their employees were matched


by means of an employee identification number. The average age of theemployees was 44 years and that of the managers was 48.4 years. Theaverage job tenure for employees was 9.6 years, and the average orga-nizational tenure was 18.6 years; for managers, these averages were 7.6and 24.9 years, respectively. The subordinates held a variety of positionssuch as mechanics, maintenance workers, and supervisors. The presentresearch was part of a larger organizational survey for which a randomstratified (by age and tenure) sample of 1071 employees representing alllevels and job types in the organization were contacted by mail and askedto participate. Potential respondents were asked to complete four surveysover a 2-year period. Slightly fewer than half of them (N = 441, 41%)agreed to do so. The present research used data from the third surveyadministration.

Measures

Measures for the main variables of interest were obtained from twosources. Employees provided self-reports of demographic information,requests made and those requests granted by their immediate manager,affective commitment, job satisfaction, and turnover intention. Ratings ofemployee organizational citizenship behavior and job performance wereassessed by their immediate manager. All measures (unless otherwisenoted) used a 5-point Likert-type scale where ‘‘1’’ represented stronglydisagree and ‘‘5’’ corresponded to ‘‘strongly agree’’.

DemographicsEmployees reported their gender, age, and the number of years of

formal education they possessed.

Leader ResponsivenessAn initial list of 20 items that employees might request from their

manager was developed by the researchers through discussion with theorganization. Our goal was to create an unambiguous list of items so thatemployees could readily report which of these items they had requestedfrom their manager in the past year, and which of those items requestedwere granted by their manager. Our analysis showed that only seven ofthese items were requested with sufficient frequency to warrant inclu-sion in the analysis of leader responsiveness; the remaining items wereexcluded from further analysis. The included items were focused on payincrease, promotion, training opportunities, changes in job procedures,feedback on job performance, more support for doing the job (e.g.,equipment), and support for personal problems (e.g., time off). The per-centage of employees requesting these items ranged from 17% (promo-tion) to 36% (changes in job procedures/polices). Examples of items that


were excluded included revision in performance standards, opportunityto train others, and retirement counseling. An index of leader respon-siveness to employee requests was constructed by dividing the number ofitems granted by the number of items requested, yielding a possiblerange of scores from 0 to 100%.

Equity SensitivityA five-item scale developed by Huseman et al. (1985, 1987) was used

to assess equity sensitivity. For each item respondents divide 10 pointsbetween a benevolent and an entitled response option. Points assigned tothe five benevolent options are summed yielding a possible score rangefrom 0 to 50. A sample item from the ESI is ‘‘In any organization I mightwork for, it would be more important for me to: (a) get from the organi-zation, (b) give to the organization.’’ Studies have demonstrated adequatereliability of the ESI (King & Miles, 1994; Miles et al., 1989); in thisstudy coefficient alpha was .76.

Organizational CommitmentWe used Meyer and Allen’s (1984) eight-item measure (alpha = .87)

of affective commitment. A sample item from the measure is ‘‘Thisorganization has a great deal of personal meaning to me’’.

Job SatisfactionThree global items (alpha = .81) were used to assess job satisfaction

(from Seashore, Lawler, Mirvis, & Cammann, 1982). A sample item fromthe measure is ‘‘All in all, I am satisfied with my job.’’

Turnover IntentionA single global item (‘‘How likely is it you will look for another job

outside of your organization within the next year’’?) was used to measureturnover intention on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all likely) to 5(extremely likely). This item was developed by the researchers whendeveloping the original survey.

Organizational Citizenship BehaviorOrganizational citizenship behavior was assessed with the Altruism

scale (seven items, alpha = .88) developed by Smith, Organ, and Near(1983). A sample item was ‘‘Volunteers to do things not formally requiredon the job’’.

Job PerformanceA global one-item measure was used to measure job performance

(‘‘How would you rate the employee’s job performance’’?) on a scaleranging from 1 (consistently below expectations) to 5 (consistently


exceeds expectations). This item was developed by the researchers whendeveloping the original survey.

RESULTS

Table 1 displays descriptive statistics and intercorrelations amongthe variables. Consistent with past research, equity sensitivity is posi-tively correlated with job satisfaction and organizational commitment,and negatively correlated with turnover intentions. As predicted inhypothesis one, leader-responsiveness is positively correlated with jobsatisfaction, organizational commitment, and organizational citizenshipbehavior, and negatively correlated with turnover intentions. However,no relationship exists between leader responsiveness and jobperformance.

In addition to intercorrelations, we tested the hypotheses usinghierarchical regression. Similar to past studies (e.g., O’Neill & Mone,1998), we control for gender, age, and education level in the regressionanalysis. Following Cohen and Cohen (1983), we entered gender, age,and education level in step 1, followed by leader responsiveness as themain effect in step 2. We used pairwise deletion of missing data,resulting in a useable sample of 257 respondents. Results of the hierar-chical regressions for hypothesis one are displayed in Table 2. Asexpected, leader responsiveness was positively related to job satisfaction(B = .36, p < .001), organizational commitment (B = .50, p < .001), andorganizational citizenship behavior (B = .30, p < .05). Leader respon-siveness was also negatively related to turnover intentions (B = ).27,p = .06) and positively related to performance (B = .29, p = .07), althoughthese relationships were not sufficiently strong to meet traditionalstandards of statistical significance.

For hypothesis two, we sought to examine the moderating effects ofequity sensitivity on leader-responsiveness and job satisfaction, organi-zational commitment, turnover intention, organizational citizenshipbehavior and job performance. Again, following Cohen and Cohen (1983),we entered gender, age, and education level as control variables in theregression equation (step 1). Then, we entered the main effects for thehypothesized variables in step 2. Finally, in step 3, we entered the cross-product interaction terms. Using pairwise deletion of missing data, wehad a useable sample of 253 respondents. The only significant interactionfound was for job satisfaction (B = ).03, p < .05; incremental change inR2 = .02, p < .05). To identify the form of the interaction, the equation wasplotted at the mean, low and high levels of leader responsiveness (Stone& Hollenbeck, 1989). The nature of the interaction, as illustrated inFigure 1, is consistent with our expectations. For more entitled


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Table 2Hierarchical Regression Results for Variables Predicting Job Satisfaction,

Organizational Commitment, Turnover Intention, Performance and Organiza-tional Citizenship Behavior (OCB)

Predictor variable

Jobsatisfaction

OrganizationalCommitment

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Perfor-mance OCB

B DR2 B DR2 B DR2 B DR2 B DR2

Step 1 .04* .00 .04* .04 .00Sex .02 .02 ).13 .22 ).08Age .01** .00 ).00 ).01* .00Education Level ).01 7.01 .06* .01 ).00

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Note. ***p < .001; **p < .01; *p < .05.

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individuals, there was a stronger positive relationship between leaderresponsiveness and job satisfaction than for Benevolents.

DISCUSSION

Overall, our findings suggest that increased leader responsiveness toemployee requests results in more favorable employee attitudes andbehaviors. Leader responsiveness was significantly and positively relatedto job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Furthermore, leaderresponsiveness was positively related to organizational citizenshipbehavior, but not to job performance. Our findings are consistent withsocial exchange theory, which argues that employees are likely toreciprocate with attitudes and behavior beneficial to their organizationswhen they are treated favorably (Blau, 1964; Rousseau, 1989; Uhl-bienet al., 2000).

Unlike organizational citizenship behavior, in-role performance is aless discretionary form of employee behavior. That is, certain basicstandards for job performance must be met by employees in order toretain their employment (e.g., showing up for work on time, performingcertain job activities, etc.). Furthermore, employee performance is partlydetermined by factors outside the employees’ control. That is, job per-formance is an interaction of a variety of variables including motivation,skills, and environmental factors, some of which are not under the directcontrol of the employee. This may explain the non-significant relation-ship between leader responsiveness and job performance, as well as thenon-significant interaction between equity sensitivity and leaderresponsiveness in predicting job performance. In sum, these findingssuggest that leader responsiveness to employee requests may be astronger predictor of employee attitudes and citizenship behavior than ofin-role job performance.

Although we have described leader responsiveness as an employee-initiated social exchange process, it is also a reciprocal process. Clearly,the employee’s behavior plays a central role in the exchange by makingan initial request for a particular benefit from their manager, therebyproviding an opportunity for the manager to respond. However, analternative interpretation of our findings is that managers are moreresponsive to employees with favorable attitudes and behaviors. Thus,the relationship between leader responsiveness and employee attitudesand behaviors may be one of reciprocal causality rather than a uni-directional causal effect. On the other hand, post-hoc analyses do notsupport this view since we found a non-significant relationship betweenequity sensitivity orientation and manager fulfillment of requests. Thus,despite attitudinal differences between Entitleds and Benevolents,


managers fulfilled requests made by Entitleds and Benevolents withequal frequency perhaps due to a feeling of obligation or fairness. Fur-thermore, some subordinates are more likely to make requests thanothers, and employees will also differ in the nature of their requests.Equity sensitivity theory would suggest that Entitled employees wouldmake more requests than Benevolents since Entitleds have a ‘‘getter’’orientation as contrasted with the more ‘‘giving’’ orientation of Benevo-lents (Huseman et al., 1987). Interestingly, our post-hoc analysisrevealed that benevolence was positively associated with requestingbehavior. One explanation for this counter-intuitive finding is that sinceBenevolents have higher commitment and satisfaction than Entitleds,perhaps they are more engaged in their work and seek out more oppor-tunities and support by making more requests. Although Entitleds makefewer requests than Benevolents, they seem to be more distressed whentheir requests are not granted.

We also found that equity sensitivity moderated the relationshipbetween leader responsiveness and job satisfaction. The relationshipbetween leader responsiveness and job satisfaction was more positive forentitled than for benevolent individuals. Thus, when leader responsive-ness was high, both Entitleds and Benevolents were relatively satisfied.However, when leader responsiveness was low, job satisfaction declinedmuch more dramatically for Entitleds than for Benevolents. Perhapsbecause entitled individuals expect a lot, the manager’s satisfaction ofthose expectations had a large impact on their job satisfaction. In con-trast, since benevolent individuals expect less and are more tolerant ofunder-reward (Huseman et al., 1985; King et al, 1993), the manager’sability and/or willingness to satisfy their expectations had less impact ontheir job satisfaction.

This study had several limitations, which point to suggestions foradditional research. First, employee requests represents only one way inwhich employees obtain rewards and resources. Employees also mayobtain rewards when the manager provides them without being promp-ted by a request. It may be that our results were not stronger since wemeasured only a portion of the total rewards that employees received.Thus, an important question for future research is to determine therelative importance of employee-initiated resource requests versusmanager-initiated rewards. It is also noteworthy that leadershipresponsiveness has a stronger relationship between the self-report atti-tudinal measures (e.g., job satisfaction) than manager-rated behavioralmeasures (e.g., performance), suggesting that common method variancecould be an influence.

Another limitation of our study is that the leader responsivenessindex was based solely on the percentage of requests fulfilled, thustreating all types of requests alike, however, certain types of requests


were likely to have greater importance to employees than others. On theother hand, our leader responsiveness index was comprised of thoseitems that were most frequently requested (e.g., pay raise, promotion,training opportunities), and we believe that the frequency with whichitems are requested should be related to their relative importance toemployees. Our survey contained employee ratings of the importance of asubset of the items employees could have indicated they had requestedand their manager might have provided. A post-hoc analysis revealedthat the mean importance of the items used to compute leader respon-siveness was significantly greater than the importance of the itemsexcluded (due to their infrequency of request). Unfortunately, we lackeda measure of the vigor with which a manager pursued an employee’srequest. In some cases the manager may have tried hard but was unableto grant a request, whereas in other situations, the manager may havedenied the request without making any attempt to satisfy the employeeor even ignored the request. Thus, in future studies it would be valuableto determine if granting high priority employee requests has a differentimpact on work attitudes and behaviors than fulfilling lower priorityrequests. It would also be valuable to determine the employee’s percep-tion of their manager’s effort to grant their requests. Additionally, itwould be of interest to determine if Benevolents and Entitleds makedifferent types of requests since the former place greater emphasis onintrinsic outcomes whereas Entitleds focus more on extrinsic outcomes(Miles et al., 1989, 1994). A final limitation of our study was that themajority of our sample was male which raises some questions as to thegeneralizability of our findings. Future research should explore therelationship of gender to employee reactions to leader responsiveness.

The present findings suggest a number of implications for manage-ment practices. First, managers should be attentive to employee requestssince our findings suggest that employees have both attitudinal andbehavioral reactions to their manager’s response to their requests. Thus,even the most benevolent employees may eventually come to believe theyare less valued than others if their requests are consistently denied orignored. Second, there are times when a manager cannot be responsive toa request. The manager may not have the resources or authority to honorthe request, or the request isn’t justified. In those cases, managers shouldmake efforts to mitigate any negative reactions by using fair decisionprocesses, explaining why the request cannot be honored, and findingalternative ways to meet the employee’s needs and ways to demonstratethat the employee is valued. Our findings suggest that such practicescould have the greatest impact on the attitudes and behaviors of indi-viduals with an entitled orientation.

In summary, this study demonstrated that leader responsiveness toemployee requests has a significant impact on both employee attitudes


and behavior. We also extended prior research by showing that equitysensitivity moderates the relationship between leader responsivenessand job satisfaction, as well as corroborating previous results supportingthe equity sensitivity construct (e.g., King & Miles, 1994). Our resultssuggest that managers can directly impact employee attitudes andbehaviors by considering individual differences in employee sensitivity toequity and being responsive to employee needs.

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Leader Responsiveness