ABSTRACT
Employees pay special attention to relationships with their immediate supervisors (Fiske, 1993). Indeed relationships with supervisors, managers, or bosses may be the single most important workplace relationships that employees form (Dienesch & Liden, 1986), in part because supervisors—via formal power—control resources to provide and withhold financial rewards, job opportunities, and promotions. Supervisory relationships also exert powerful effects on the types of relationships that employees form with each other. The relationships that supervisors have with their employees set the tone for how coworkers interact and also serve as a foundation for the quality of the social capital in a work group, including the extent to which employees cooperate and collaborate with each other (Carmeli, Ben-Hador, Waldman, & Rupp, 2009). Since organizational resources flow through a network of relationships (Baker & Dutton, 2007), supervisory relationship quality has a broad-reaching impact throughout the organization.
