Abstract:

Every organization has a structure understood as “a pattern of relationships among positions in the organization and among members of the organization” (Miller, 2007). These relationships may be different in their nature. They are often called workplace relationships, which are “unique interpersonal relationships with important implications for the individuals and the organizations in which the relationships exist and develop” (Gaur and Ebrahimi, 2013). Many authors share the view that one of the most important relationships within organization is the relationship between superior and subordinate, often named as hierarchical relationships (Kozina, 1990; Abu Bakar and Mustaffa, 2008; Gaur and Ebrahimi, 2013; Oginni et al., 2014). The reason might be its common occurance in an organization – every individual is involved in a superior-subordinate relationship. Despite such a wide scale of this phenomenon, the output of existing literature insufficiently organizes and explains it. Researchers do not even agree on the number of publications on the subject. Some claim that there were large attempts within superior-subordinate relationship (Waldron, 1999; Abu Bakar and Mustaffa, 2008; Kassing, 2009) and conversely, some point to the deficiencies in this area (Friebel and Raith, 2004; Hart and Moore, 2005; Smeets and Warzynski, 2008).