The Role of Status Incongruence in Employee Responses to Participative Leadership

Although prior research has focused on the negative effect of status incongruence, this paper offers an optimistic perspective as it relates to participative leadership. Status incongruence refers to a situation in which status characteristics of the supervisor and the subordinate are opposite to standard norms. Leaders who are younger, less educated, less experienced, or shorter tenured than their followers are status incongruent. Incorporating role congruity theory with the participative leadership literature, we argue that participative leaders in status incongruence will be able to boost subordinate affective commitment and organizational citizenship behaviors more than their counterparts with lower status incongruence. We further propose a moderated mediation model whereby the positive indirect relationship between participative leadership and subordinate organizational citizenship behaviors through affective commitment will be stronger for status incongruent dyads. By finding support for our hypotheses across two field studies, this work suggests role congruity theory to consider leadership style as well as multiple status indicators together in understanding how role (in)congruity arises for leaders with varying levels of status incongruence. Suggestions for how human resource (HR) managers should consider leadership style as part of their HR strategy for fostering participative workplaces are offered.