Most managers wish to engender a degree of loyalty from their team, and in a recent post I highlighted the power of simply asking your team their priorities and how you can support them. The rationale is that you’re showing your team you care about what matters to them, whilst also offering your help in them delivering on their goals. It’s something that a recent study from the University of Exeter reinforces.
The study is one of the first to explore the quality and quantity of exchanges between the leader and their followers, and to do so from the perspective of the follower. The authors suggest that it was previously thought that a high quality relationship between leader and follower would be sufficient to engender loyalty, but the new research shows that it also depends on whether the employee values the relationship in the first place.
“Our findings have real implications for the workplace because it shows that the perceived importance of a manager is also really important in building loyalty,” the authors suggest. “While it’s worthwhile investing in employees who see the relationship as important, employers would also do well to look for ways to motivate those staff who don’t.”
Empowering your team
The study, which involved nearly 500 participants across two experiments, required volunteers to complete three questionnaires over a six month period to shed light on their relationship with their team leader. The results revealed that employees with a strong relationship with their boss were more likely to feel empowered, and to subsequently take an active attitude towards their work.
“We also found that a quality relationship with a boss caused greater feelings of psychological empowerment and this effect was felt more strongly when the relationship was viewed as important by the employee,” the researchers explain. “For instance, if a member of staff receives recognition and praise from a leader, it has more impact on the way they view their own competencies the more importance they place on that relationship.
In Nine Lies About Work, Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall advocate a weekly check-in by the manager to each of the people in their team. The process consists of two simple questions:
- What are your priorities this week?
- How can I help?
This is a simple first step you can make to help build the kind of relationship identified in the Exeter research.
