How do leader behaviors affect employee performance at work? An eight-country study

Leaders play a critical role in ensuring people perform at work. Cross-cultural research, however, suggests that what constitutes effective leadership may vary depending on context. This study investigates the effects of leaders’ instrumental behavior on employees’ job embeddedness and its downstream consequences on task performance and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB) across cultures. We also predict that country-level autonomy-embeddedness values, a cultural dimension reflecting the degree of collective integration and conformity within a society, moderates this relationship. Utilizing multi-level techniques to analyze responses from 1,048 employees and 444 supervisors across eight countries, we find support for our predictions. Specifically, the positive relationship between leaders’ instrumental behavior and employees’ job embeddedness is stronger in high autonomy cultures. Additionally, leaders’ instrumental behavior has a positive indirect effect on leader ratings of employees’ task performance and OCB via job embeddedness in high autonomy cultures. Finally, the indirect effect of leaders’ instrumental behavior on task performance via job embeddedness is negative in high embeddedness cultures. We discuss the implications of our findings for the literatures on job embeddedness, leadership, and talent management across cultures.