Leader-Member Exchange and Its Relationship to Quality of Work and Stress among Information Technology (IT) Workers
Year: 2016
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: In the U.S., Information Technology (IT) organizations are a $639.4 billion-a-year business. Roughly, 60% of all IT workers feel stress in their jobs. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study was to identify to what degree, if any, a relationship existed between Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) and the levels of stress in IT organizations. The sample population consisted of IT professionals (n=449) of which 249 workers were from IT small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) and 200 workers from large IT organizations. The target population (N=84,000) was from the Western region of the U.S. The Internet-based 28-item survey included the LMX-7 and Parker and DeCotiis job stress instruments. Examined were two dimensions of stress - time stress and anxiety stress. In IT SMEs and large IT organizations there were high quality leader-member exchanges. However, there was no correlation between LMX quality and time stress among IT workers within SMEs (p = .954) and large organizations (p = .346). Similarly, in SMEs, there was no relationship between anxiety stress and quality LMX (p = .264). Nonetheless, in large IT organizations there was a correlation between anxiety stress and quality LMX (p = .010). The p-value of .010 suggested that there was overwhelming evidence to infer that the alternative hypothesis was true.
Institution: Brenau University
Language: English
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W2479655294