Leaders' mental health and leader‐member exchange: Exploring relations on different levels of analysis

Research on leader-member exchange (LMX) has shown that the relation between leaders and followers may be considered from different angles. Leaders may form individual relationships with followers (LMX quality), may agree with their followers on these relationships (LMX agreement), and may form different relationships within their work group (LMX variability). We posit that leaders' mental health may function as an antecedent for these different forms of LMX. We use conservation-of-resources theory as a theoretical model to describe how leaders' mental health may interact with relationship quality with followers on different levels.