The lion's share: The impact of credit expectations and credit allocations on commitment to leaders

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The lion's share: The impact of credit expectations and credit allocations on commitment to leaders
The Leadership Quarterly

In this paper we examine how the relationship between leaders' credit allocation behavior and subordinates' commitment to their leader is influenced by the fulfillment of subordinates' expectations (i.e. expecting one type of behavior and having that behavior occur). We predicted that subordinates would display less commitment to their leaderwhen their leader took credit for the subordinates' work. However based on expectancy violations and psychological contracts research we also predicted that expectation fulfillment wouldmoderate this relationship. In two experimental studieswe found that the negative effects of leader credit taking on commitment to the leader were mitigated when the subordinate expected the leader to take credit. However when subordinates expected to receive credit and did not the negative impact of leader credit taking was enhanced. We discuss the implications of these results for both theory and practice.

Citation: 
The Leadership Quarterly 24 (2013) 80 – 93

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