Bridging the gap: Managers' external relationships and their effects on subordinates

In this dissertation, I develop a conceptual model for how managers' roles as boundary spanners within their organizations affect the perceptions, attitudes, relationships, and performance of their subordinate employees. Drawing on literatures in social networks, status characteristics theory, social identity theory, and resource allocation theory, I suggest that managers' external relationships---the connections that managers make to organization members outside of their subordinate work group---have a material impact on their subordinates' perceptions of their work environment and their managers. These perceptions, I argue, serve as four specific mechanisms in an indirect effects model that connect managers' external relationship to their employees' task performance and work attitudes (e.g. organizational commitment) and the Leader Member Exchange (LMX) relationships between manager and subordinate. I apply the theoretical model to two salient types of managerial relationships: those with their bosses and those with their horizontal peers.;I test the hypotheses in a field study across three sites encompassing 200 front line managers, their bosses, and their front line subordinate employees. I find that managers' external relationships serve as both conduits of information and perceptual cues of managerial status in the eyes of their subordinates. When managers have more extensive peer networks and deeper relationships with their bosses, their subordinates have greater access to organizational information and perceive the managers as higher status within the organization. Status is, in turn, related to subordinate performance, organizational commitment, and LMX with the focal manager. Information access is associated with subordinate organizational commitment. In addition, when subordinates perceive that they have the necessary resources to adequately perform their roles and when they perceive the manager as being "one" with the group---both potential aspects of the manager's boundary spanning role---they experience greater organizational commitment and LMX relationships. The framework and study shed considerable light on the nature of managers' boundary spanning roles and the manner in which their external relationships may shape these roles.;The theoretical model and results make contributions to the literatures on leadership, social networks, and boundary spanning. I discuss these contributions as well as the implications of my findings for practicing managers.