The Power of Neglected Ones: A Social Network Perspective on LMX in Teams

Abstract

Conventional wisdom and organizational scholars have suggested that the success of organizations, units, and teams lies in the hand of core employees who demonstrate superior performance or occupy important positions. As a result, core employees often have priorities to receive valuable resources, particularly when the resources are limited. Similarly, leadership theorists have advocated that managers can advance their unit performance by developing high quality relationships with a few trusted key employees and relying them to perform at higher levels. However, we challenge this long held assumption by demonstrating that in interdependent teams, the success of team performance is heavily dependent on peripheral members in team social network, who thereby deserves more attention from leaders. Specifically, collecting data from 88 teams, we found that LMXS of peripheral team members (i.e., having lower task performance, occupying peripheral positions in team networks) were more strongly related to team processes, team performance and viability than core members’ LMX. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.