Whatever It Takes: How and When Supervisor Bottom-Line Mentality Motivates Employee Contributions in the Workplace

By Mayowa T. Babalola, Mary B. Mawritz, Rebecca L. Greenbaum, Shuang Ren, Omale A. Garba. Journal of Management, 2020

170 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Given that many organizations are competitive and finance centered, organizational leaders may lead with a primary focus on bottom-line attainment, such that they are perceived by their subordinates as having a bottom-line mentality (BLM) that entails pursuing bottom-line outcomes above all else. Yet, the field is limited in understanding why such a leadership approach affects employees’ positive and negative contributions in the workplace. Drawing on social exchange theory, we theorize that supervisors high in BLM can influence employees’ felt obligation toward the bottom line, which in turn can influence employees’ task performance and unethical pro-organizational behavior (UPB). We also examine employee ambition as a moderator of this process. Using three-wave, multisource data collected from the financial services industry, our results revealed that high-BLM supervisors elevate employee task performance as well as UPB by motivating employees’ felt obligation toward the bottom line. Furthermore, we found that employee ambition served as a first-stage moderator, such that the mediated relationships were stronger when employee ambition was high as opposed to low. Our findings break away from the dominant dysfunctional view of BLM and provide a more balanced view of this mentality.

Subfields: Demography, Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d23fb55dfcd9e5a6c1de4d6f73349f569d57db1d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Demography

1. Mayowa T. Babalola
2. Chidiebere Ogbonnaya

In Information Systems and Management

1. Mayowa T. Babalola
2. Shuang Ren

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Mayowa T. Babalola
2. Katrin Riisla
3. Gbemisola T. Soetan
4. Shuang Ren
5. Chidiebere Ogbonnaya
6. Kubilay Gok

Citations in the corpus

• Thriving at work but insomniac at home: Understanding the relationship between supervisor bottom-line mentality and employee functioning (2020, background): “, 2012), engage in unethical behavior (Babalola et al., 2020), and experience intensified feelings of shame due to unethical behavior (Bonner et al.”