2022-04-25, Tillmann, Sebastian, Hüttermann, Hendrik, Sparr, Jennifer L., Boerner, Sabine

Shared leadership is not only about individual team members engaging in leadership, but also about team members adopting the complementary follower role. However, the question of what enables team members to fill in each of these roles and the corresponding influence of formal leaders have remained largely unexplored. Using a social network perspective allows us to predict both leadership and followership ties between team members based on considerations of implicit leadership and followership theories. From this social information processing perspective, we identify individual team members’ political skill and the formal leaders’ empowering leadership as important qualities that facilitate the adoption of each the leader and the follower role. Results from a social network analysis in a R&D department with 305 realized leadership ties support most of our hypotheses.

2008, Sparr, Jennifer L., Sonnentag, Sabine

This study examines employees' personal control and feelings of helplessness at work as partial mediators of the relationship between the supervisor-employee feedback environment and well-being (job satisfaction, job depression, job anxiety, turnover intentions) at work. Findings are reported from a cross-sectional field study with 345 participants from three different industries. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that feedback environment was positively related to job satisfaction, personal control over information and decisions, and was negatively related to helplessness, job depression, and turnover intentions. Furthermore, personal control partially mediated the
relationships between feedback environment and job satisfaction as well as job depression. Helplessness partially mediated the relationships between feedback environment and job depression, job satisfaction, and turnover intentions. This study adds to the literature on feedback environment in highlighting the importance of the supervisor-employee feedback environment for well-being at work and introducing personal control and helplessness as mediating variables.

2008, Sparr, Jennifer L.

Based on the feedback intervention theory (Kluger & DeNisi, 1996) and the assumption that feedback affects human needs for belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaning, this dissertation addresses the question of how, why, and under what conditions beneficial feedback is positively related to well-being and desirable behavior at work. In this dissertation, beneficial feedback is operationalized as a good feedback environment as defined by Steelman, Levy, and Snell (2004) and as feedback that is perceived as fair (in line with organizational justice research; Colquitt, 2001). The focus lies on feedback that supervisors provide to their employees about the employees performance.
In Study 1, the relationship between the feedback environment and well-being at work was examined. Personal control and feelings of helplessness were studied as mediators of this relationship. In a field study, 345 employees from three different industries answered a questionnaire. Results from hierarchical regression analyses showed that the feedback environment is positively related to the indicator job satisfaction, and negatively related to job depression and turnover intentions. The relationships between feedback environment and job satisfaction, as well as job depression, were partially mediated by personal control and feelings of helplessness. Additionally, feelings of helplessness mediated the relationship between the feedback environment and turnover intentions.
Study 2 examined the relationships between perceived feedback fairness and well-being as well as personal control at work. Leader-member exchange quality was focused upon as a mediating mechanism. Ninety-nine employees from two different industries answered two questionnaires approximately half a year apart. Results from hierarchical regression analyses revealed that perceived feedback fairness was positively related to the indicators job satisfaction and personal control, and negatively related to job depression and turnover intentions. Leader-member exchange mediated these relationships.
In Study 3, the relationship between perceived feedback fairness and personal initiative as well as innovative behavior was studied. Based on the feedback intervention theory, task-detail focus after feedback reception was examined as moderator of these relationships. Data were gathered from 126 employees from different industries. Performance data were assessed with external-source ratings. In order to account for dependencies in the data due to the team structure, hierarchical linear models were calculated with random intercepts and fixed effects. Results of these models show that the relationship between perceived feedback fairness and personal initiative and innovative behavior was dependent on task-detail focus of the recipient. If feedback recipients think a lot about task details after feedback reception there is a positive relationship between feedback fairness and personal initiative. If they think rarely about task details after feedback reception there is a negative relationship between feedback fairness and personal initiative as well as innovative behavior.
These three studies show that beneficial feedback is positively related to well-being at work and under certain conditions also with positive behavior at work. These relationships can be explained by the resources beneficial feedback provides to feedback recipients, including control perceptions or high-quality exchange relationships. I argue beneficial feedback thus on the one side satisfies self-relevant needs and on the other side fosters the willingness of the feedback recipient to reciprocate the feedback with positive behavior, as social-exchange theory (Blau, 1964) predicts. These considerations are integrated into feedback intervention theory. Additionally, the necessity of combining feedback with goals that direct the attention to the specific task is discussed. This dissertation contributes to the feedback literature in disclosing the relevance of feedback for well-being and behavior of the employees, and in identifying mediating and moderating mechanisms. The present data indicate that a systematic combination of feedback and fairness is a promising line of research that helps to better understand the complex relationships between feedback and positive outcomes at work. As practical implication based on the present results I suggest that informing supervisors about the relevance of fairness and contextual characteristics of feedback delivery, and training their feedback delivery skills, will have positive consequences for well-being and work behavior of the employees.

2008, Sparr, Jennifer L., Sonnentag, Sabine

In a field study we examined employees fairness perceptions of supervisor feedback and their relationships with employee well-being (job depression, job anxiety, job satisfaction, turnover intentions) and perceived control at work. We hypothesized quality of leader member exchange (LMX) to partially mediate these relationships. We measured the above constructs in two different industries at two separate times over an interval of 6 months. Results from hierarchical regression analyses based on data from 99 employees supported our hypotheses. Perceived fairness of feedback was positively related to job satisfaction and feelings of control at work, and negatively related to job depression and turnover intentions. These relationships were mediated by the quality of LMX. Job anxiety was neither related to fairness perceptions of feedback nor to LMX, but positively related to frequency of negative feedback from the supervisor. Our research contributes to both, the feedback and leadership fairness literature, in connecting fairness of leader feedback to LMX and important work-related outcomes.