The relationship between attachment style and leader-member exchange

Leader-member exchange (LMX) has been found as significant and positive impacts in organizational leadership studies. Thus, it´s important to conduct further study of the antecedents of LMX. Based on the fact that past research has less concerned about the subordinates´ intentions in dealing with interpersonal emotions, this study used subordinates´ attachment styles as the antecedent of LMX, in which the theory of mind was used to explain the interactions between leaders and their members. First, the questionnaires of pre-test were collected and conducted with the item analysis, exploratory factor analysis, reliability analysis, and validity analysis for the development of the official scale. Official data was collected in six technological universities located in Mid-Taiwan. Samples are students engaging in full-time jobs and study in the Department of Continuing Education of these six universities. 227 valid questionnaires were collected. The confirmatory factor analysis, reliability analysis, and validity analysis were conducted to see the goodness-of-fit between the collected data and the measurement model. Furthermore, the test of structural model was processed to testify the relationships between the exogenous latent variables and the endogenous latent variables. Finally, using SEM (structural equation modeling, LISREL8.80) to testify the proposed hypothesis. The result of this study indicated that the different attachment styles of subordinates had impacts upon the development of LMX.