Relationships Between Communication Style and Leader-Member Exchange: An Issue for the Entrepreneur (Survey‪)‬

ABSTRACT It is almost a truism that the entrepreneur, even more than the manager in a large, established business, is dependent in many ways on the organization's employees. In turn, it is widely recognized throughout the managerial literature that the willingness of employees to put forth their best efforts arises in large part from the quality of the employees' relationship with their manager--here, the entrepreneur. What can the entrepreneur do to influence the quality of the relationship? In this research, our focus is upon communication, and we examine the relationships between findings from two related literature streams: a prescriptive body of theory involving "best practices" in supervisor-subordinate communication, and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory from the management literature. LMX suggests that supervisors may afford differing treatment, and thus possibly use different communications tactics, with subordinates in higher quality exchange relationships than with those in lower quality relationships. This literature, however, leaves unresolved whether the entrepreneur, as supervisor, should treat employees differently. In this research we find evidence that employees perceive differences, especially in level of participation-related communication, depending upon whether they believe they are in a higher or lower quality LMX relationship. Moreover, we find weak evidence for congruence between supervisor and subordinate perceptions of the quality of the exchange and no significant evidence that similarity of the dyad influences its quality. Implications for entrepreneurs are developed.