Leaders’ intimidation impression management and subordinates’ affective job commitment in Nigeria

Purpose The quality of the relationship between leaders and their followers appears to be one of the critical determinants of employees’ commitment at work. For instance, it has been empirically established that the impressions that managers convey of themselves to their subordinates, is a critical factor in the leader-follower relationship. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between leaders’ intimidation impression management (IM) and subordinates’ affective job commitment in the telecommunications industry in Nigeria. Design/methodology/approach The design adopted for this study is the cross-sectional survey design. The questionnaire was utilized to generate data from a sample of 306 employees from the six major telecommunication companies in Nigeria. The Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient was used as the inferential test statistic for assessing the relationship between leaders’ intimidation IM and subordinates’ affective job commitment. Findings The results showed that leaders’ threat, warning, fear-arousal, and discomfort-arousal all had significant but weak association with subordinates’ affective job commitment. The study thus found that as leaders apply intimidation IM strategies, workers’ sense of emotive attachment to their organization only improves minimally. Research limitations/implications Data were generated from employees, indicating that the outcome is based on their perception which may be skewed. Practical implications The outcome of the study will help managers in the Nigerian telecommunication industry to avoid the pitfalls that are associated with the arbitrary and excessive use of intimidation as an IM tactic. Rather, they would be guided to encourage good quality leader-member-exchange between them and their subordinates in enhancing individual and organizational performance. Originality/value This is the first main work to examine and identify the nature of the predictive effect of leaders’ intimidation IM on subordinates’ affective job commitment in the telecommunications industry in Nigeria.