Unlocking employee innovation through leader-member exchange: New directions and developments

This study looks at how leader-member exchange (LMX) quality affects employee innovation. It explores how both good and lower-quality relationships with supervisors can influence creativity at work, depending on situational characteristics. Furthermore, it studies how LMX relates to the “not-invented-here” syndrome, where employees may reject innovative ideas that come from outside their team or organization just because they are considered external. Finally, this study explores within-team dynamics and social comparison effects created by differentiated LMX relationships and employees’ relative LMX standings, and their interrelations with innovativeness.

The findings show that LMX influences employee innovation at both individual and team levels in complex ways, and studying these from novel perspectives has the potential to improve existing knowledge.