Managing Your Boss (MYB) as a proactive followership behavior: Construct validation and theory development
Date
2022-12-05
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Personnel Psychology
Abstract
Employees can be proactive in establishing good working relationships with their managers to enhance their own effectiveness. We propose that an important way that they can do so is by engaging in behaviors we refer to as “Managing Your Boss” (MYB) that involve employees taking the initiative to understand their managers’ goals, needs, and working styles and adapt their job priorities and actions accordingly. We integrate theories on proactivity and followership to lay the conceptual foundation for the study of MYB. We underscore the conceptual distinctiveness of MYB from related constructs. Moreover, we propose that MYB can help employees improve their performance by enabling them to develop high quality leader-member exchanges (LMX) and argue that these effects are amplified in unstructured work environments where jobs are not standardized or when managers fail to provide adequate task structure. Using 1313 working adults across a set of four studies and seven samples, we develop a validated measure of MYB, establish its nomological network, and demonstrate support for key elements of our theoretical model. We discuss the implications of our findings for research and practice.
Description
This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Gajendran, R. S., Mistry, S., & Tangirala, S. (2022). Managing Your Boss (MYB) as a proactive followership behavior: Construct validation and theory development. Personnel Psychology, 00, 1– 36. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12545, which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12545. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Use of Self-Archived Versions. This article may not be enhanced, enriched or otherwise transformed into a derivative work, without express permission from Wiley or by statutory rights under applicable legislation. Copyright notices must not be removed, obscured or modified. The article must be linked to Wiley’s version of record on Wiley Online Library and any embedding, framing or otherwise making available the article or pages thereof by third parties from platforms, services and websites other than Wiley Online Library must be prohibited. This article will be embargoed until 12/05/2024.
Keywords
managing your boss, MYB, proactive behaviors, followership, construct validation
Citation
Gajendran, R. S., Mistry, S., & Tangirala, S. (2022). Managing Your Boss (MYB) as a proactive followership behavior: Construct validation and theory development. Personnel Psychology, 00, 1– 36. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1111/peps.12545