I once had a manager who was notorious for her contemptuous refrain: "I'm not here to be liked. I'm here to get the job done." Needless to say, she wasn't liked. But neither did she ever get the job done.
Other managers are the opposite. They desperately crave to be liked. Their refrain isn't a noun but a verb. They refrain from having difficult conversations in the same way they refrain from dealing with conflict and negotiation. They pretty much avoid anything that might diminish how much their employees like them. And as per my old boss, they too rarely get the job done since they're so preoccupied trying to please, or trying not to displease.
So how important is it to be liked? Research in decades gone by has demonstrated the extent to which employees like their boss is a strong predictor of their job satisfaction, performance and loyalty. But in more recent years, scholarly interest in workplace liking has fallen out of favour.
It's been replaced by a cold and impersonal term that actually represents something warm and personal: 'leader-member exchange' – the strength of the relationship between managers and employees.
What many people are saying these days is that it matters less whether you like your boss and more that you work well together. But that approach has been questioned by researchers at Michigan State University who have just published their extensive analysis comparing the two.
They scrutinised the findings of more than 300 prior studies. Those studies used a number of common items to test workplace relationships as well as how much employees liked their boss, with the following examples of the latter:
- "Working with this supervisor is a pleasure."
- "I think this supervisor would make a good friend."
- "My supervisor is a lot of fun to work with."
- "I like my supervisor very much as a person."
I look at that list and immediately reflect on the fact I personally don't need to be good mates with my boss or to have fun together. I just want us to have a productive and successful relationship. I'm therefore more inclined to prioritise that clinical term – leader-member exchange – which is represented in those studies by questions on how well managers understand and respond to their employees' problems, needs, potential, that kind of thing.
Well, the culmination of all the evidence has concluded that when compared to the strength of the relationship, employees who like their boss are more inclined to be emotionally attached to their organisation and are at lower risk of resigning. The variance is in the vicinity of 25 per cent, which is significant.
It's important to note that having a strong relationship also generates positive outcomes; just not to the same degree. And as the researchers explain: "A follower liking a leader does not guarantee the working relationship between leader and member is of high quality." What they infer is that it's not enough for employees to like you in the same way it's not enough to just work well together.
All of this, however, misses a critical piece: the opposite situation. It's one thing for employees to like their manager but what about the reverse? According to the meta-analysis, when managers genuinely like their employees, their employees are more inclined to work beyond the confines of their job description. In other words, they give more of themselves to their employer, most probably in reciprocation for how generously they're being treated.
But what if you've inherited a team that's fundamentally unlikeable? What do you do then? Let's leave that mammoth topic for another time. For now, though, just imagine if the feeling were mutual …
They refrain from having difficult conversations in the same way they refrain from dealing with conflict and negotiation.
James Adonis is the author of How To Be Great. Follow MySmallBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
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