Curvilinear effects of familiarity at work on leadership and team identification

Abstract

Background: Familiarity at work refers to a sense of closeness and self-disclosing intimacy due to mutual sharing of personal matters, a state of close relationships experienced with others at work (e.g., colleagues, leaders, clients). Scholars and practitioners provide competitive arguments on the outcomes of familiarity among individuals at work and debate on the counterproductive vs. beneficial consequences of relational closeness for workplace productivity and cohesiveness. Objective: The present study examined the curvilinear effects of employes’ familiarity with leaders, colleagues, and clients on their teams’ social identity (i.e., group member prototypicality - GMP) and their perception of authentic, leader-member exchange, transformational and servant leadership styles. Methods: Anonymous survey data were collected from 838 employes from twenty Italian organizations and the nomological network was tested using structural equation modeling. Results: Results indicated a curvilinear inverted U-shaped relationship between familiarity with leader and GMP as well as all leadership styles, such that employes with moderate levels of familiarity with leaders reported the highest levels of group identification and perception of all leadership styles, compared to employes with high or low levels of familiarity with leader. Moreover, familiarity with colleagues exerted a positive linear effect on GMP and negative linear on servant leadership, whereas familiarity with clients exerted no effect on GMP nor leadership factors. Conclusions: Overall, leadership factors and GMP start to decrease at high levels of familiarity with leader. Theoretical and practical implications of results are discussed in light of the relevance of preventing the too-much-of-a-good-thing effect in order to develop healthy psychosocial environments in organizations.