When bosses and staff agree on hierarchy, employees work better, study finds

When leaders and their employees hold similar beliefs about how much unequal power is acceptable in an organization, employees appear to follow more actively and, in turn, rate their own job performance higher. That is the central finding of a new study published in Digital Economy and Sustainable Development, which examined paired survey data from 70 leaders and 265 followers working in Chinese enterprises that had adopted digital workplace platforms such as DingTalk and Feishu.

The research, led by Guangning Zhang and Wenjia Zhao with Jiajia Meng, was grounded in social comparison theory, the idea that people evaluate their own views and abilities by comparing themselves with others when objective standards are absent. The authors argued that when employees and their leaders share a similar power distance orientation—the degree to which each accepts unequal power distribution—an assimilation effect is triggered. Employees come to believe they can achieve what their leaders have achieved through their own efforts, generating admiration and motivating what the researchers call positive followership behavior: proactive responses to leadership that include loyalty, effective communication, and respectful learning.

Power distance itself is a well-established concept in organizational behavior, drawn from Hofstede’s work on cultural values. Leaders with high power distance typically endorse power disparities with subordinates and may adopt an authoritarian style, viewing compliance as a mark of effectiveness. Low power distance leaders instead emphasize mutual respect, employee voice, and balanced power allocation. The same spectrum applies to followers: high power distance employees accept significant disparities and often endorse their leaders’ attitudes and decisions, while low power distance employees pursue autonomy and selectively embrace leaders’ decisions. Because individuals within the same team can differ substantially on this dimension, the authors focused not on either party’s orientation alone but on the match—or mismatch—between the two.

To capture that match statistically, the team used polynomial regression and response surface analysis rather than simple difference scores. They mean-centered the leader power distance (L) and follower power distance (E) scores, then regressed employees’ positive followership behavior on L, E, their squares, and their product. This approach, following Edwards’s 1994 methodology, allows researchers to assess how an outcome varies along the congruence line, where leader and follower scores are equal, and along the incongruence line, where they diverge in opposite directions. The quadratic terms collectively explained a significant share of additional variance in followership behavior, indicating the relationship was genuinely nonlinear.

The results supported the study’s first hypothesis. The curvature of the response surface along the incongruence line was significantly negative, meaning positive followership behavior rose as the two parties’ scores moved toward congruence and fell as they moved apart. Along the congruence line itself, the slope was significantly negative, meaning that among matched pairs, lower shared power distance was associated with stronger followership than higher shared power distance. In other words, both parties agreeing that hierarchy matters less produced more proactive following than both parties agreeing that hierarchy matters more.

The study also compared two mismatched configurations. When leaders held low power distance but followers held high power distance, followership behavior was stronger than in the reverse case of high-power-distance leaders paired with low-power-distance followers. The authors reasoned that low-power-distance leaders build open, inclusive digital communication channels and delegate decision-making authority, which high-power-distance followers internalize as supervisor approval, enhancing their sense of security and motivating them to contribute ideas. By contrast, low-power-distance followers working under high-power-distance leaders crave autonomy and voice in flat digital structures but face leaders who insist on strict obedience, potentially weakening motivation and even producing quiet resistance through digital channels.

Positive followership behavior, in turn, appeared to carry the entire effect on performance. Using a block variable method that weighted and summed the five polynomial terms into a single composite, the researchers found the composite significantly predicted followership behavior, and followership behavior significantly predicted job role performance—measured across three dimensions: job proficiency, job adaptability, and job initiative. When followership behavior was added to the model, the direct link between the power distance composite and performance became statistically insignificant, a pattern consistent with full mediation. A bootstrap analysis estimated the indirect effect at 0.285, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 0.153 to 0.424, which excluded zero.

Employee disposition mattered as well. The researchers measured chronic promotion regulatory focus, a stable trait reflecting an individual’s drive toward growth and positive goals. Employees scoring higher on this trait showed a stronger relationship between power distance congruence and followership behavior, and the moderated mediation analysis confirmed that the mediating pathway through followership was stronger for these employees. The difference between high and low regulatory focus groups was 0.181, with a confidence interval of 0.079 to 0.336. The authors suggested these employees actively use digital tools to acquire knowledge and communicate across departments, heightening their receptiveness to leader support and amplifying the motivational effects of congruence.

The data came from two survey waves separated by half a month. At the first time point, leaders reported their own power distance and demographic information while employees reported their followership behavior; at the second, employees reported their job role performance and regulatory focus. This two-stage design was intended to reduce common method bias, and statistical checks—including a single-factor confirmatory model with poor fit indices and a Harman’s single-factor test—suggested no serious bias problem. Scales were translated and back-translated, and reliability coefficients ranged from 0.823 to 0.863 across the five measured constructs. Confirmatory factor analysis supported discriminant validity among the five variables.

The authors acknowledged several limitations. The data were cross-sectional despite the two-wave design, so causal ordering cannot be firmly established, and employees self-reported their own performance, which may reflect social desirability. Most participants were drawn from enterprises in Liaoning Province, limiting geographic generalizability, and the study did not examine how congruence affects leaders themselves or how differing follower power distances within a team shape collective outcomes. Future work, they suggested, could adopt longitudinal tracking, obtain leader-rated performance measures, and compare digital and non-digital workplaces. Still, the findings offer a practical signal for managers navigating flattened digital hierarchies: aligning beliefs about power—particularly toward lower shared power distance—may be a meaningful lever for encouraging proactive employee behavior and, through it, stronger role performance.

Subject of Research: How leader–follower power distance congruence relates to employees' job role performance in digital workplaces

Article Title: The impact of leader–follower power distance congruence on employees’ job role performance in the digital workplace

Article References: Zhang, G., Zhao, W., & Meng, J. (2025). The impact of leader–follower power distance congruence on employees’ job role performance in the digital workplace. Digital Economy and Sustainable Development, 3(1), Article 22. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44265-025-00073-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44265-025-00073-6

Keywords: power distance, leader-follower congruence, digital workplace, job role performance, positive followership behavior, social comparison theory, regulatory focus, polynomial regression, response surface analysis, Chinese enterprises, mediation analysis, organizational behavior