Towards a measure of your acquaintanceship with your leader: preliminary conceptual and empirical evidence

Garmsiri, Mahyar (2018) Towards a measure of your acquaintanceship with your leader: preliminary conceptual and empirical evidence. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Employees often leave workplaces because of a manager, not the job. Embedded in the leadership literature is the assumption that relationships between managers and employees are confined to a workplace. In this thesis, I challenge this assumption and address a conceptual gap in how research has traditionally investigated the extent that leaders and followers become acquainted with one-another. A theoretical argument is made for introducing an acquaintanceship measure from social psychology into business research. Measures of leader-follower relationships currently used in organizational behavior and leadership research are compared against acquaintanceship to avoid the problem of reintroducing an already existing construct with a new label. A survey study is also conducted for the purposes of empirical examination of a revised acquaintanceship measure and an exploratory factor analysis was conducted. The results empirically corroborate the theoretical conclusions of the construct analysis and suggest the revised Personal Acquaintance Measure retains some psychometric rigor in a business context. Potential contributions of this acquaintanceship measure and future research directions are outlined.

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