ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1583837
Are we on the same wavelength? Supervisor-subordinate cognitive style congruence and its association with supervisors' self-awareness through leader member exchange
Provisionally accepted
- 1American University of Kuwait, Safat, Kuwait
- 2Australian University - Kuwait, West Mishref, Kuwait
- 3Independent Researcher, Istanbul, Türkiye
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Leaders' self-awareness is a crucial factor for the effectiveness of leaders. Cognitive styles that are defined as how people perceive information and how they use it to steer their attitudes and behaviors are seen as potential factors in fostering self-awareness. In the current research, through the lenses of Social Identity Theory (SIT), we posit that cognitive style congruence between supervisors and their subordinates would have a positive relationship with supervisors' self-awareness, and leader-member exchange (LMX) would mediate that relationship. Employing multilevel polynomial regression on time-lagged dyadic data gathered from 189 subordinates and 36 supervisors reveal that LMX fully mediates the relationship between cognitive style congruence (only for knowing and creating styles) and supervisors' self-awareness on transformational leadership. Results also yielded that LMX is at the highest level when the knowing and creating styles of supervisors and subordinates are congruent and high.
Keywords: Transformational leadership, self-awareness, cognitive styles, leader-member exchange, Polynomial analysis
Received: 26 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 AlReshaid, Erturk, Alkhayyat, Abdallah, Abidi and de la Roche. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Faisal AlReshaid, American University of Kuwait, Safat, 13034, Kuwait
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