Horizontal Team Member Exchange (HMX): How Team Member Relationships Affect Individual and Team Outcomes,
Abstract
Teams build our automobiles (Sherman, 1994), manage our companies (Hackman, 1990), protect our country (Oser, McCalJum, Salas, & Morgan, 1989), and are increasingly employed in the U.S. workplace (Ilgen, Major, Hollenbeck, & Sego, 1995) to accomplish complex and critical tasks (Kozlowski, Gully, McHugh, Salas, & Cannon- Bowers, in press). Perhaps the single feature which most distinguishes teams from other organizational forms is that team members are interdependent; they must interact to accomplish their work (Dyer, 1984). Although some proclaim the benefits of teamwork without caveat (e.g., Teampower, 1994), team member interactions can be the source of process losses (Steiner, 1972) as well as synergistic performance gains (Hackman, 1987). One approach to understanding team member interactions is to focus on dyadic working relationships; to seek to understand how they develop (e.g., Gabarro, 1990) and how they influence the way team members interact. Although role theory (e.g., Katz & Kahn, 1978) and its derivatives, leader-member exchange (LMX; e.g., Graen & Scandura, 1987) and team-member exchange (TMX; Seers, 1989) provide a framework for understanding workplace interactions, they do not address the working relationships in team dyads. Role theory describes the interactions in social syStems in general but provides no specific guidance for team dyads. LMX focuses on the leader-subordinate dyad and is concerned solely with the quality of the vertical exchange relationship; it acknowledges, but does not address, the impact of horizontal relationships. TMX focuses on the relationship between a single member and the entire peer group, ignoring the dyadic interactions between team members.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 28, 1995
- Accession Number
- ADA318748
Entities
People
- Earl R. Nason
Organizations
- Air Force Institute of Technology