It’s brutal. It’s nasty. It leaves you solitary and poor, and makes your career aspirations short. It’s the state of nature, as conceived by crotchety survivor of the English Civil War (Hobbes & MacPherson, 1982) and supported by cross-cultural late 20th-century research. It’s the theory most of us have believed in some way since puberty: there are in-groups and out-groups, and people in the in-group get the glory. It’s the only leadership theory titled for possible tattoos. It’s the leader-member exchange: LMX (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995).
If you’re in the in-group, life’s probably going to get better because you’ll get “more information, influence, confidence, and concern from you leader,” which will move you further and further from the out-group (Northouse, 2016, p. 138). If you’re in the out-group, expect to get your basic contractual needs met but little more. In fact, feel free to come to work, do your job, and go home because the bottom line is that you and your leader and, by proxy, the in-group just aren’t that compatible (Northouse, 2016, p. 139). Don’t take it personally; it’s just who you are.
The research shows that the High School Musical cheer that “We’re all in this together” really comes true – if you are the most beautiful head of the math club and basketball team and drama productions, life is likely to get better for you and your in-group friends. Teachers will help you. Coaches will help you. You will move up in leadership, and your in-group will move with you (Ortega, 2006). But that raises the question: what if you want in?
Graen and Uhl-Bien (1995) describe “leadership making” (i.e. in-group/ out-group formation) as going through three phases: stranger, acquaintance, and mature partnership. During these phases, leaders and followers move their relationship from a reliance on formal procedures and defined exchanges based on self-interest to increasingly informal and reciprocal exchanges based on the needs of the group. The assignment of out-group status often results from early interactions in which followers exhibit lower “enthusiasm, participation, gregariousness, and extraversion” than desired by the leader (Northouse, 2016, p. 142). Once a follower has been assigned by the leader to the out-group, direct negotiation to re-enter the in-group is unlikely to achieve the desired results, as evidenced by the Diary of a Wimpy Kids franchise (Freudenthal, 2010), The Princess Diaries (Marshall, 2001), Clueless (Heckerling, 1995), Mean Girls (Waters, 2004), and almost any other film about adolescent friendships.
But the adolescent reality of LMX gives a sense of hope. What do those movies have in common? With few exceptions, they involve a crisis that allows the leader and follower to re-interpret each other by passing through the stranger/ acquaintance/ partnership sequence, or they end with the emergence of a new leader and formation of a new in-group. In Diary of a Wimpy Kid, it takes the crisis of the “Cheese Hand”. In The Princess Diaries, it’s the crisis of a kingdom in collapse. In Clueless and Mean Girls, the girls on the out form a new, more powerful in-group that excludes their former leaders. For the sake of sounding at least a little academic, let’s call the first of these strategies common enemy and the second revolution.
Here’s how it worked out in my experience. On moving to Central Asia in 2004, my highly-relational, optimistic leader quickly marked me for the in-group, and I received all the benefits thereof for two years. He lived in another country, so all benefits had to be consumed over a cup of coffee on the three or four days a year he visited, but it was better than the out-group. In 2006, we had to leave our assigned country due to political problems and moved to a country where I shared an office with him. Within about six months, he no longer found me optimistic and extroverted – and with due cause. Having lost our house, our local friends, several years of work, and our life savings, to move to a new country only to find our team leaders were moving out, and a revolution was imminent, I was not ideal in-group material. However, my wife was fully enjoying maternity leave as a chance to have time with our children, meet the neighbors, and set up a new home. She was enthusiastic, optimistic, and quickly the boss’s new in-group lead.
How, you may wonder, did this story get a happy ending? First, the revolution: my wife and I agreed to quit if he made her my boss, even if it was a de-facto position. We’d joined as a team, and we weren’t going to let this hurt our marriage. We shared this with several in-group people, and they rallied around us, and the group started taking on “preservation of marriage” as an organizational value. Second, a common enemy allowed the boss and I to get to know each other again: he had marriage problems. I stuck with him, showed that I cared about him and was willing to go the extra distance for the sake of making him look good to his bosses even during his personal struggles. We’re still not mutual-favorite teammates, but we both value what the other brings to the table and want the other in the room.
References
Freudenthal, T. (2010). Diary of a Wimpy Kid. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1196141/
Graen, G. B., & Uhl-Bien, M. (1995). Relationship-based approach to leadership: Development of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory of leadership over 25 years: Applying a multi-level multi-domain perspective. The Leadership Quarterly, 6(2), 219–247. https://doi.org/10.1016/1048-9843(95)90036-5
Heckerling, A. (1995). Clueless. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112697/
Hobbes, T., & MacPherson, C. B. (1982). Leviathan (Fourth Edition edition). Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
Marshall, G. (2001). The Princess Diaries. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247638/
Northouse, P. G. (2016). Leadership: Theory and Practice, 7th Edition (7 edition). Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, Inc.
Ortega, K. (2006). High School Musical. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475293/
Waters, M. (2004). Mean Girls. Retrieved from http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377092/
