EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Strategic Alignment of Leadership and Work Climate: Field Experiment on Context-Dependent Supervision Effectiveness

Zicheng Lyu and Xiaoli Yang ()
Additional contact information
Zicheng Lyu: College of Economics and Management, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110866, China
Xiaoli Yang: College of Economics and Management, Shenyang Agricultural University, Shenyang 110866, China

Administrative Sciences, 2025, vol. 15, issue 10, 1-20

Abstract: This study examines how the organizational work climate shapes the effectiveness of supervision on employee performance. While traditional management theory assumes supervision universally enhances productivity, we observe a puzzling paradox: facing identical tasks and wage systems, some firms rely heavily on hierarchical supervision while others thrive with minimal oversight. Through a four-month field experiment across two Chinese agricultural enterprises (5851 observations), we test whether the supervision’s effectiveness depends on the alignment between leadership practices and organizational climate. In formal management firms (FMFs) characterized by hierarchical governance and arm’s-length employment relationships, directive supervision significantly reduces task completion times by 0.126 standard deviations, equivalent to approximately 4.3 s or 2.8% of the average completion time, with this effect remaining stable throughout the workday. Conversely, in network-embedded firms (NEFs) operating through trust-based relational contracts and social norms, identical supervisory practices yield no performance gains, as informal social control mechanisms already ensure high effort levels, rendering formal supervision redundant. These findings challenge the “best practices” paradigm in strategic HRM, demonstrating that HR success requires a careful alignment between leadership approaches and the organizational climate—an effective HR strategy is not about implementing standardized practices but about achieving a strategic fit between supervisory leadership styles and existing work climates. This climate–leadership partnership is essential for optimizing both employee performance and organizational success.

Keywords: employee performance; supervision; contingency theory; organizational form; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L M M0 M1 M10 M11 M12 M14 M15 M16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/15/10/385/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3387/15/10/385/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:15:y:2025:i:10:p:385-:d:1761472

Access Statistics for this article

Administrative Sciences is currently edited by Ms. Nancy Ma

More articles in Administrative Sciences from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().

 
Page updated 2025-10-01
Handle: RePEc:gam:jadmsc:v:15:y:2025:i:10:p:385-:d:1761472