Do employees really prefer to work under unlikable managers? Evidence from Brazil

Resumo

The constant transformations and needs imposed by the globalized world have brought a new dynamic to companies, marked by complex processes, such as organizational change, internationalization, mergers and acquisitions, succession, among others. Dealing with all the uncertainties of the modern environment is a great challenge, in which the leader plays a key role in achieving the goals and objectives pursued by companies. There are several leadership approaches and theories in the literature that have already been developed and are being developed and tested to shed light on organizational relationships and develop tools and methodologies that can be applied in companies and, consequently, improve relationships and interactions between leaders and their subordinates, in order to increase organizational performance. However, most works focus on the leader's perspective and little attention has been given to models that assess subordinates' perception. The objective of this work is to understand whether subordinates prefer or not to work under likable managers and whether needs for affiliation, one particular characteristic of Brazilian culture, could moderate subordinates' preferences. For this, an online survey experiment was carried out with 113 undergraduate students with professional experience. Data were analyzed using statistical tests such as T test and linear regressions. Results obtained in this research demonstrated that the cultural aspect may influence subordinates’ preference for leadership styles, as there was a preference for likable leaders, as well as a high level of need for affiliation in Brazilian culture. These findings reveal important implications for global organizations that operate in different countries and are therefore subject to different cultures, serving as a reference for analyzing the choice of the most appropriate leader for the type of culture. It can also be concluded from the obtained results that subordinates' choices for leaders are not made based only on competence, but also on the basis of likability, as observed in this study. In addition, results indicate that other evaluation criteria are also taken into consideration in the bottom-up selection, such as competence, decisiveness, and leadership. It was also discovered in this research that the likability-competence tradeoff did not occur, as originally proposed by Geys (2014)

Ficha do documento

Tipo

Dissertação

Ano

2022

Instituição

Fundação Getulio Vargas

Fonte

Repositório da FGV

Idioma

Inglês

Acesso

Acesso aberto

Identificador

oai:repositorio.fgv.br:10438/33635

Temas

Administração Pública

Palavras-chave

LiderançaCultura brasileiraNecessidade de afiliaçãoSimpatiaLeadershipBrazilian cultureAffiliation needsLikabilityAdministração públicaRelações trabalhistasTrabalhadoresSupervisoresEmpresas