Empowerment or Ostracism? The Consequences of Interpersonal Interaction Between Star Employee and Team Leader

Abstract: Star employees can enhance the organizational value creation not only through their direct and disproportionate contribution, but also by their extensive and profound influence on colleagues via interpersonal interaction. Current research primarily focuses on the interpersonal effect of stars on non-star employees; however, investigations into the interpersonal dynamics between star employees and their leaders remain limited. Based on social interdependence theory and dominance complementarity theory, this study built a moderated mediation model to explore the “double-edged sword” mechanisms and boundary condition of the interpersonal interaction of star employees on team leader. We designed a scenario experiment and a field study to test the model.
In the scenario experiment (Study 1), we manipulated “the subordinate’s stardom” (i.e., star or non-star) and “the subordinate’s dominance trait” (i.e., high or low), resulting in a 2 by 2 categories of the scenarios. Data was collected from the participants in an Executive Development Program hosted by a Chinese university through an online questionnaire platform (https://www.wjx.cn). The final sample size was 356. The results revealed that: (1) Through the mechanism of leader’s trust in subordinate, the subordinate’s stardom had a positive influence on his or her leader’s empowerment (tendency) and a negative impact on the leader’s ostracism (tendency); via the mechanism of perceived threat to status, the subordinate’s stardom negatively affected his or her leader’s empowerment (tendency) and positively influenced the leader’s ostracism (tendency). (2) The subordinate’s dominance trait moderated the relationship between the subordinate’s stardom and the leader’s perceived threat to status, such that the more dominant of the subordinate, the more likely the leader perceived threat to status caused by the subordinate’s stardom, thus exhibiting less empowerment (tendency) and more ostracism (tendency) toward the subordinate.
To replicate these findings and increase their external validities, we then conducted a multi-source, multi-wave field study. Employees and their direct supervisors from a Chinese new material manufacturing company were invited to participate in our survey. We collected the data at two time points (i.e., a one-month time lag) through another online questionnaire platform (https://end.huajuetech.com). The paired sample size was 291. Study 2 replicated most of the findings in Study 1, except for the non-significant indirect effect of subordinate’s stardom on leader’s empowerment behavior through perceived threat to status.
In summary, our study makes three important theoretical contributions: (1) We clarified the consequences and mechanisms of star employees’ interpersonal interaction on team leaders, thereby enriching research on the interpersonal effect of star employees. (2) By examining the boundary conditions of stars’ impact on team leaders, our study prompted scholars and managers to explore how to build a proper work context to leverage stars’ value. (3) Our study aided leadership researchers to further investigate the antecedents of positive or negative leadership behaviors (i.e., empowerment and ostracism) from the perspective of “the interpersonal relationship between a leader and the key minority subordinates”.