Team-Level Leader-Member Exchange Relationship and Employee&#x02019;s Job Performance: The Role of Team Shared Mental Model and Task Interdependence

Yang Xiao; Chen Dongli; Liu Zhi

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250316

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2025, Vol. 48 ›› Issue (3) : 673-685. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250316

Social, Personality & Organizational Psychology

Team-Level Leader-Member Exchange Relationship and Employee’s Job Performance: The Role of Team Shared Mental Model and Task Interdependence

Yang Xiao¹, Chen Dongli¹, Liu Zhi²

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Abstract

Team-level leader-member exchange relationship (TLMX) is the overall quality or central tendency of the leader-member exchange relationships (LMX) within a team, which defines the nature of interactions between leaders and the entire team and has a profound influence on both the teams and their individual members. Scholars have primarily explored the impact and underlying mechanisms of TLMX on teams process and effectiveness and paid less attention to subordinates' extra-role behaviors, such as innovative and helping behaviors, but neglected to investigate in-role behavior-job performance, which serves as the currency of social exchange between leaders and members and directly influences organizational effectiveness.
Drawing on the social information processing theory, this paper explores the direct effects of TLMX on job performance, its underlying mechanisms, and the boundary conditions. First, TLMX is positively correlated with the employee’s job performance. By fostering an equity rule of “high performance, high rewards” in resource allocation within the team, TLMX emphasizes the cues derived from high performance among coworkers, thereby motivating team members to elevate their own performance. Second, TLMX indirectly affects employees’ job performance through the mediation of Shared Mental Models (SMMs). SMMs refer to a common understanding among team members, developed through shared experiences, regarding expected collective behavior patterns during team actions. TLMX helps leaders in cultivating SMMs through sense-making and sense-giving processes. Furthermore, SMMs enable team members to effectively form a coherent knowledge structure of crucial elements such as team tasks and environments, minimizing the likelihood of directional errors in work and enhancing the level of implicit coordination among members. This, in turn, reduces communication costs and time, and improves the level of mutual cooperation, ultimately contributing to individuals' efficiency in completing their work tasks. Thus, TLMX enhances job performance through the mediation of SMMs. Lastly, task interdependence negatively moderates the relationship between TLMX and job performance. According to the social information processing theory, information about certain task environment features influences individual behavior. Task interdependence refers to the degree to which team members rely on each other to share resources, information, and expertise to complete their tasks, It is a representative variable reflecting team structure and task characteristics and affects the rules of resource allocation. As task interdependence increases, teams encourage members to cooperate more closely to achieve collective goals, making it more challenging to allocate resources based on equitable rules, thereby diminishing the effectiveness of TLMX in improving individual performance.
Data were collected from 550 employees across 96 teams in 13 organizations, with a minimum response rate of 80% required for inclusion in the analysis. After applying these criteria, 78 teams with 324 employees were included in the study. In addition, we distributed the questionnaires at three distinct time points. At time 1, the LMX Questionnaire was distributed to all employees in each department; at time 2, the Task Interdependence and Shared Mental Model Questionnaire was distributed to all employees in each department; at time 3, the Employee Job Performance Questionnaire was distributed to department managers. Because our theoretical model encompasses variables at both team and individual levels, we employed the Hierarchical Linear Modeling (HLM) with Mplus to analyze the data from 328 employees in 78 teams. Our findings indicate that: 1) TLMX has a positive effect on employees' shared mental model and job performance, respectively; 2) shared mental models mediate the relationship between TLMX and job performance; and 3) task interdependence negatively moderates the relationship between TLMX and job performance, such that higher interdependence weakens the positive effect of TLMX on job performance.
This study makes three key theoretical contributions: 1) it extends the research on TLMX by incorporating the social information processing theory and innovative measurement techniques, broadening the theoretical and methodological scope of TLMX research; 2) it enhances the understanding of job performance antecedents within the LMX framework by exploring the collective social exchange mechanisms at the team level; 3) it enriches the literature on shared mental models by introducing TLMX at the team level and investigating its antecedents from a leader-team relationship perspective.

Key words

team-level leader-member exchange relationship / job performance / team shared mental model / task interdependence

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Yang Xiao, Chen Dongli, Liu Zhi. Team-Level Leader-Member Exchange Relationship and Employee’s Job Performance: The Role of Team Shared Mental Model and Task Interdependence[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2025, 48(3): 673-685 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20250316

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