Can Employees Motivate Themselves? The Link between Peer Motivating Language and Employee Outcomes

ABSTRACT

This study examines whether employee outcomes can be affected through motivating language use among peers, and if these peers, therefore, may substitute the need for a leader’s use of ML. It proposes, validates a scale for, and tests the peer ML construct. Second, it develops and tests a model that highlights the comprehensive nature of both leader and peer ML and employee outcomes. Lastly, it examines its generalizability by testing it in the USA and India. Results show that peer ML has the potential to positively influence employee outcomes. However, it serves as a substitute for the Indian sample only.

KEYWORDS:

• Peer motivating language
• leader motivating language
• motivating language theory
• substitutes for leadership
• leader communication
• peer communication
• individualism
• collectivism
• India
• USA

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

¹ The appendix can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/uitj.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Business Communication - Marty Baker Graham Research Grant.