Essays on Individual Differences in Work Relationships

Qiu, Judy (2023) Essays on Individual Differences in Work Relationships. Doctoral thesis, University of London: London Business School.

Abstract

This dissertation examines how people perceive and navigate their work relationships, as a function of two key individual differences: gender and narcissism.

Chapter 1 investigates gender differences in how employees view and form trust towards others. I propose that due to socialization differences, women (vs. men) interpret trust more as feeling able to engage in self-disclosure (disclosure-based trust) with another party. Because self-disclosure entails considerable risk, female trustors are more sensitive to others’ benevolence when forming interpersonal trust. I find that these gender differences in trust conceptualization and development are associated with divergent responses to benevolent others.

Chapter 2 shows how gendered relational norms can implicate an important organizational practice: performance feedback. Many organizations provide employees with feedback based on social comparisons with others. I hypothesize and find that such relative feedback is less desirable and more emotionally costly for women, who experience greater anxiety about being evaluated on comparative terms. I further rule out performance expectations, performance, preferences for non-relative feedback, and general feedback anxiety as alternative mechanisms for the effect. Overall, these findings suggest that a widely used method of feedback inflicts disproportionally more anxiety on women.

Chapter 3 examines employees’ perceptions of their relationships with leaders to shed light on an organizational pattern: Narcissists tend to get ahead in organizations, despite not necessarily having better performance or qualifications. I propose a relational explanation wherein narcissistic employees believe they have better relationships with their supervisors than do their peers (LMXSC), even when there is no basis for such beliefs. As a result of their “relational grandiosity”, narcissistic subordinates engage in more relationship maintenance behaviors with their leaders and seek instrumental support from them, which in turn, may facilitate their advancement.