Business leaders who treat certain team members better than others risk hurting the overall performance of the team—but treating all team members the same is not the answer, according to new research.
Managers must find middle ground in how they treat team members, giving some members preferential treatment instead of treating everyone the same, but not going to the extreme end of the spectrum for preferential treatment, researchers from North Carolina State University, the University of Science and Technology in Beijing, Peking University and the University of Iowa learned.
“We found an upper limit to how far leaders should go in treating their team members differently,” says Bradley Kirkman, co-author of the paper on the work and head of the Department of Management, Innovation and Entrepreneurship in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management. “If leaders go too far with this behavior, leaders will end up with teams composed of basically two subgroups—the ingroup and the outgroup. And we know that the outgroup will not be happy about this and will start to slack off, withdraw from participating, and even go so far as to be disruptive to the ingroup team members.”
Researchers studied leaders from 145 teams composed of 928 members working at three Chinese companies: a pharmaceutical company, a telecommunications company and a manufacturing company. Team members surveyed were asked about the quality and efficiency of the team and the leader’s ability to keep them on schedule and budget. Differential treatment was measured using the “LMX7” scale that takes into account working relationships to examine the relationship between the team leader and team members.
The findings contradict previous research on the topic.
“Existing research has generally shown that leaders treating team members differently, depending on factors such as how competent they believe each member is, can result in productive teams,” Kirkman says. “Instead, we found that leaders can go too far. If a leader treats team members too differently from each other, performance suffers.”
The study appeared in the Personnel Psychology journal. The full article is available for a fee.
