Cognitive Style Congruence between Managers and their Employees: Leader-Member Exchange and Communication Satisfaction in North Cyprus Banks

This study investigates whether cognitive style congruence of managers and employees on the analytic-intuitive dimension, influences the employees’ organizational communication satisfaction. Analytic individuals like to process information systematically whereas intuitive individuals tend to take a more holistic approach. The Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) is defined as the quality of one-to-one relationship between managers and each of their employees. Employees who are in high quality LMX relationships with their manager may also have higher levels of communication satisfaction. Dyads who have similar cognitive styles may develop better LMX relationships and spend more time with their manager. Improved LMX, in turn, may lead to improved communication satisfaction. Thus, LMX quality may mediate the relationship between the cognitive styles congruence of manager-employee dyads on one hand, and employee communication satisfaction on the other. In the current study, cognitive style was measured by the Cognitive Style Index (CSI) (Allinson, Armstrong, & Hayes, 2001), leader-member exchange was measured by the LMX7, (Graen & Uhl-Bien, 1995), and communication satisfaction was measured by the Communication Satisfaction Questionnaire (CSQ) (Downs & Hazen, 1977). Data were collected from a total of 229 respondents; consisting of managers and their employees, from three banks operating in North Cyprus. Useable data from 151 employees and 43 managers (total 194) were analyzed. Results supported the similarity effect hypothesis indicating that cognitive style congruence increases employees’ organizational communication satisfaction in general compared to incongruent dyads. Furthermore, the response surface analysis also allowed us to see that the organizational communication satisfaction is higher when both manager and employee are intuitive compared to the situation when they are both analytic. Direct path analysis results confirmed that LMX quality and employees’ organizational communication satisfaction with their managers were related; though not significantly. Thus, LMX did not mediate the relationship between congruent cognitive style and communication satisfaction. The results showed that the congruence between the cognitive styles of managers one hand and their employees on the other affect the communication satisfaction of the employees. Therefore, organizations should train the managers to understand the differences in cognitive styles. Managers should become aware of the impact of their cognitive style on their communication with their employees. Managers should accommodate for the cognitive style differences in their employees when assigning appropriate tasks in appropriate formats to each group member in their departments. Keywords: Cognitive style, communication satisfaction, leader-member exchange, polynomial regression with surface analysis.