'I know it’s not your job but…': Extra-role tasks, communication, and leader-member exchange relationships

摘要

Employees are sometimes assigned tasks that lie outside their official role. Employees mayperceive such extra-role tasks (ERTs) as unreasonable or illegitimate. Grounded in roletheory and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, we conducted two studies that examinedhow ERTs are associated with supervisor-employee relationship quality and how theERT assignment is communicated. While supervisor-subordinate relationship quality wasunrelated to the likelihood and frequency with which supervisors assign ERTs to employees,employees with low-quality relationships evaluated ERTs as more unreasonable than thosein high-quality relationships. Study 1 showed that ERT messages that included a request (vs.command), acknowledgement, explanation, and appreciation were associated with higherquality LMX relationships. Study 2 found that ERT message characteristics influenced theperceived unreasonableness of the task for employees in high-quality relationships, suggestingemployees in such relationships are particularly vulnerable to “job creep” and role expansion.