Power distance orientation and perceived insider status in China: a social identity perspective

ABSTRACT

Previous studies have mostly focused on how power distance orientation leads employees to evaluate leader justice differently in relation to their treatment. However, it remains unclear how leader treatment may impact the way power distance-oriented individuals evaluate their social identities. Taking a social identity perspective, we investigated how leader social support in teams impacts the relationship between power distance orientation and perceived insider status in China. Building upon the heuristic-systematic model of information processing, we argued that high power distance-oriented individuals are more likely to make identity adjustments based on relative leader social support and team level leader social support. Hypotheses were tested using a sample of 631 employees in 78 teams. We found an interaction effect between individual power distance orientation and relative leader social support on perceived insider status, such that the negative relationship between power distance orientation and perceived insider status is mitigated when members receive relatively high leader social support. Furthermore, this interaction effect was stronger when the mean of team leader social support was high or when the differentiation of team leader social support was low. Additionally, the above three-way interaction was transmitted to employees’ affective commitment and turnover intention via perceived insider status.

KEYWORDS:

• power distance orientation
• social identity
• team leader social support
• perceived insider status
• heuristic-systematic model of information processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Data were deleted if they could not be matched between the two time points.

2. It is quite common in engineering companies for all frontline employees to be male.

3. The original scales for perceived insider status focus on insiders in the team or organizational context, and we changed the referent to leaders to make it comparable to power distance orientation.

4. To show the robustness of our results, we also removed all the controls and ran multilevel regression. The results remained consistent, which are available upon request from the first author.

Additional information

Funding

The contribution of Dr Kaili Zhang was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [71902061]. The contribution of Dr Ningyu Tang was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [72072116].