An Examination of Supervisors' Implicit Person Theory and the Supervisor-Employee Relationship

Abstract

Previous research has established that supervisor’s play an important role in conveying performance management strategies and influencing an employee’s job experience. Notably, there has been a growing area of research of how Implicit Person Theory (IPT) can contribute to supervisors’ coaching and management styles. Research within the more recent years has shown that IPT has indirect effects on the employee experience. The current study expands upon both IPT and performance management literature, by examining how an employee perceives their Supervisor’s IPT, their supervisor’s coaching style of support for developmental opportunities, and the employee’s related job outcomes of: Turnover Intentions, Job Satisfaction, and Satisfaction with Supervisor. Results from 388 men and women in various industries and organizations suggest that Perceived Supervisor IPT is related to developmental opportunities within the workplace. Additionally, we found support for Supervisor IPT being indirectly related to employees’ Turnover Intentions, Job Satisfaction, and Satisfaction with Supervisor via Perceived Developmental Opportunities. When adding Employee IPT to our mediated model, we only found marginally significant support for employees’ Satisfaction with Supervisor. Additionally, we controlled for Leader Member Exchange (LMX) within our moderated mediation model and found non- significant interactions on the indirect path of Perceived Developmental Opportunities on all three employee outcomes and obtained non-significant mediations nested within our greater model. Within our exploratory analyses we found evidence of IPT interaction between an employee and supervisor predicting LMX, Turnover Intentions, and Job Satisfaction. Ultimately, this research contributes to performance management, IPT, and LMX research by providing evidence of how a developmental coaching style of providing opportunities to employees can influence the employees’ job experience and is related to their perceptions of their leader.