When Can Humble Top Executives Retain Middle Managers? The Moderating Role of Top Management Team Faultlines
研究高层管理团队断裂线如何削弱谦逊高管通过提升工作满意度来留住中层管理者的效果，基于43个团队的多源数据验证了跨层次调节作用。
Top management in organizations must effectively retain middle managers (MMs)—who are central linking pins in strategy processes—as loss of their human and social capital can threaten strategy implementation. While long envisioning how leaders motivate subordinates to stay, management scholars have largely neglected how teams in which leaders belong (e.g., top management teams [TMT]) constitute an organizational context that moderates their ability to retain subordinates. Building on recent theory and research that a leader’s humility discourages subordinates from voluntarily departing by increasing their job satisfaction, we propose that faultlines in TMTs can exert cross-level effects attenuating how humble executives sustain MMs’ job satisfaction, and how MMs’ job dissatisfaction drives their voluntary turnover. We verify these effects with a multisource, multiphase dataset of 43 TMTs, 313 top executives, and 502 MMs. Our study thus bridges the macro and micro divide to offer a multilevel inquiry into contextual influences on voluntary turnover, identifies a boundary condition for leader humility effects, and clarifies how TMT faultlines represent a contextual constraint on how top executives induce MM subordinates to stay.