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Abstract
The practice of organizational democracy requires members to exert influence. However, members often “pass” on the opportunity to exercise upward influence because they perceive the act to be threatening to them or to their supervisors. Drawing from Porter's early political theory of upward influence (Porter, Allen, & Angle, Citation1981), this study examined the role of relationship maintenance behavior and relationship quality in shaping threat perceptions in 2 different influence contexts. A survey of 319 working adults revealed that established patterns of relationship maintenance behavior predisposed employees to view situations involving upward influence to be more or less threatening. The current quality of the leader–member relationship was an even more substantive predictor. However, context moderated the relational effects. Relationship variables accounted for more variance in perceived threat when the influence was intended to advance legitimate (organizational), rather than illegitimate (personal), objectives. It is suggested that a “threat management” model of communication could guide future research on upward influence and similarly risky forms of workplace communication.
Notes
Note. LMX = leader–member exchange.
We recognize that the use of scenarios involves certain methodological trade-offs. The primary advantage is in increasing researcher control over situational variations. Such control is necessary when testing hypotheses about variations in context. A primary disadvantage is ecological validity. It is possible that the scenarios have little connection to the real experiences of respondents. However, recommendations for improving validity have been available for some time (Roloff, Citation1994), and we incorporated them in our own approach. More specifically, we pilot-tested the scenarios with a comparable sub-sample of 21 working adults. These individuals read the scenarios and subsequently rated them using 7-point Likert-type scales tapping realism, plausibility, persuasive effort required, and the degree to which the persuasive request was an imposition. We also solicited suggestions for improving the scenarios and making them comparable. For all but one of the items (imposition), the mean rankings were above 5.0, and in the expected direction. Participants rated the imposition implied in the personal scenario as somewhat lower (4.3) than that associated with the organizational request (4.9). The scenario was adjusted slightly to make the imposition more pronounced.
Considerable research has suggested that participants communicate differently when pursuing personal and organizational influence objectives (Ansari & Kapoor, Citation1987; Kipnis, Schmidt, & Wilkinson, Citation1980; Schmidt & Kipnis, Citation1984; Waldron, Citation1999; Waldron, Foreman, & Miller, Citation1993; Yukl & Falbe, Citation1990). From our viewpoint, these persuasive objectives are different because they activate different types of threat (self, other, and relationship). That logic guided our efforts to create and pilot-test two unique but comparable scenarios. We interpret these statistical results as evidence that we were successful in creating scenarios that were similar in overall threat, but different on specific dimensions of threat.