Friendship, Advice and Distant Ties with Leaders and Similarity in Citizenship Behavior

We adopt the view of leadership as a relational phenomenon and draw on social influence theories to investigate whether leaders motivate followers to engage in similar interpersonal citizenship behavior (ICB) as leaders. We argue that employees will demonstrate ICB similar to leaders with whom they have advice and distant ties (when employees consider coworkers to be leaders but do not have direct ties with those leaders), whereas employees will have dissimilar ICB to leaders with whom they have friendship ties. Results of a social network study of 132 employees in the business college of a large southwestern university indicate that employees have similar levels of interpersonal citizenship behavior to leaders with whom they have advice ties and dissimilar levels of interpersonal citizenship behavior to leaders with whom they have friendship ties. We find distant ties with leaders have no effect on interpersonal citizenship behavior. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.