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When Managers and Their Teams Disagree: A Longitudinal Look at the Consequences of Differences in Perceptions of Organizational Support

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Abstract

The authors argue that over time the difference between team members' perception of the organizational support received by the team (or team climate for organizational support) and their manager's perception of the organizational support received by the team has an effect on important outcomes and emergent states, such as team performance and team positive and negative affect above and beyond the main effects of climate perceptions themselves. With a longitudinal sample of 179 teams at Time 1 and 154 teams at Time 2, the authors tested their predictions using a combined polynomial regression and response surface analyses approach. The results supported the authors' predictions. When team managers and team members' perceptions of organizational support were high and in agreement, outcomes were maximized. When team managers and team members disagreed, team negative affect increased and team performance and team positive affect decreased. The negative effects of disagreement were most amplified when managers perceived that the team received higher levels of support than did the team itself.
When Managers and Their Teams Disagree: A Longitudinal Look at the
Consequences of Differences in Perceptions of Organizational Support
Michael R. Bashshur
Universitat Pompeu Fabra Ana Herna´ndez and Vicente Gonza´lez-Roma´
University of Valencia
The authors argue that over time the difference between team members’ perception of the organizational
support received by the team (or team climate for organizational support) and their manager’s perception
of the organizational support received by the team has an effect on important outcomes and emergent
states, such as team performance and team positive and negative affect above and beyond the main effects
of climate perceptions themselves. With a longitudinal sample of 179 teams at Time 1 and 154 teams at
Time 2, the authors tested their predictions using a combined polynomial regression and response surface
analyses approach. The results supported the authors’ predictions. When team managers and team
members’ perceptions of organizational support were high and in agreement, outcomes were maximized.
When team managers and team members disagreed, team negative affect increased and team performance
and team positive affect decreased. The negative effects of disagreement were most amplified when
managers perceived that the team received higher levels of support than did the team itself.
Keywords: team climate, organizational support, perceptual agreement
It is well established that employees form global perceptions of
how much their organization cares about their well-being and values
their contributions (Eisenberger, Huntington, Hutchison, & Sowa,
1986; Shore & Tetrick, 1991). When employees perceive high levels
of such support, or “perceived organizational support” (POS) (Eisen-
berger et al., 1986), they are said to reciprocate in the form of
increased performance, citizenship behaviors, and commitment. Of
course, POS does not solely benefit the organization. POS also pro-
vides employees with the assurance that help will be available when
needed to do the job and to deal with work-related hassles (Rhoades
& Eisenberger, 2002) and is related to higher levels of job satisfaction
and lower levels of stress (e.g., Eisenberger, Cummings, Armeli, &
Lynch, 1997; Ferris & Kacmar, 1992; Randall, Cropanzano, Bor-
mann, & Birjulin, 1999; Shore & Tetrick, 1991; Shore & Wayne,
1993).
But the effect of POS is not limited to individual-level behaviors,
attitudes, and outcomes. Perceptions of support from the organization
to the team can also influence team-level outcomes such as team
performance and team goal achievement (Guzzo & Dickson, 1996).
Because perceptions of the features, events, and processes that take
place in the work environment are frequently shared by team mem-
bers (Anderson & West, 1998), team members may also share their
perceptions about the amount of support that the team receives from
the organization, and consequently, a team climate for organizational
support will emerge. Indeed, there is empirical evidence for the
emergence of a team climate for organizational support (Gonza´lez-
Roma´, Fortes-Ferreira, & Peiro´, 2009) as well as an impact for this
type of climate on team processes, such as communication and deci-
sion making, and team outcomes, such as performance and team
potency (Gonza´lez-Roma´ et al., 2009; Kennedy, Loughry, Klammer,
& Beyerlein, 2009). It is on the effects of this climate for organiza-
tional support that the present article focuses. However, the emphasis
here is not on the effects of the climate itself, but on the effects of
different perceptions of that climate.
Given that climate at higher levels of analysis is conceptualized as
shared individual perceptions of the work environment, research on
team climates for organizational support, like most climate research in
general (e.g., Borucki & Burke, 1999; Gonza´lez-Roma´ et al., 2009;
Naumann & Bennett, 2002; Simons & Roberson, 2003), has focused
on team members’ aggregated perceptions (the average team percep-
tion). Even when researchers have broadened the construct space of
climate research to include additional components of climate such as
climate strength (the degree of within-team agreement in climate
perceptions; e.g., Dawson, Gonza´lez-Roma´, Davis, & West, 2008;
Gonza´lez-Roma´, Peiro´, & Tordera, 2002; Schneider, Salvaggio, &
Subirats, 2002) and climate configuration or (non)uniformity (the
distribution of individual responses in a group; e.g., Brown & Koz-
lowski, 1999; Gonza´lez-Roma´, Herna´ndez, Peiro´, Fortes, & Gamero,
2006), the focus remains on team members’ perceptions.
In contrast, research on the effectiveness of work teams frequently
involves collecting perceptions of the team from different stakehold-
ers (e.g., team leaders, customers, team members) in order to under-
stand team processes and outcomes from a variety of perspectives
(Gibson, Cooper, & Conger, 2009; Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001;
McKay, Avery, & Morris, 2009). These studies consistently find that,
This article was published Online First February 21, 2011.
Michael R. Bashshur, Department of Economics and Business, Univer-
sitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain; Ana Herna´ndez, Department of
Methodology of Behavioral Sciences and IDOCAL, University of Valen-
cia, Valencia, Spain; Vicente Gonza´lez-Roma´, Department of Social Psy-
chology and IDOCAL, University of Valencia.
This investigation was partially supported by Spanish Ministry of Edu-
cation and Science Research Grants BSO2000-1444 and SEJ2006-14086/
PSIC.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Michael
R. Bashshur, Department of Economics and Business, Unviversitat Pom-
peu Fabra, Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, Barcelona, Spain 08005. E-mail:
michael.bashshurupf.edu
Journal of Applied Psychology © 2011 American Psychological Association
2011, Vol. 96, No. 3, 558–573 0021-9010/11/$12.00 DOI: 10.1037/a0022675
558
This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.
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