# What the Relationship Between Boss and Employee Is Called Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/relationship-between-boss-and-employee-is-called/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/relationship-between-boss-and-employee-is-called.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving working with your manager at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer The relationship between boss and employee is called the manager-employee relationship - or, in research, leader-member exchange. Here's what that means. ## Key facts - Title: What the Relationship Between Boss and Employee Is Called - Category: Working with Your Manager - Primary skill: Working with Your Manager - Related skills: Communication, Influence - Primary keyword: relationship between boss and employee is called - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/relationship-between-boss-and-employee-is-called/ ## What this page covers - The relationship between boss and employee is called the manager-employee relationship - or, in research, leader-member exchange. Here's what that means. - Practical guidance for relationship between boss and employee is called - How this topic connects to Working with Your Manager ## Detailed explanation The relationship between boss and employee is called the manager-employee relationship, or more formally the employment relationship. In organizational research it has a more precise name — leader-member exchange, or LMX, the one-to-one working relationship a manager forms with each individual who reports to them. Older academic writing calls it the superior-subordinate relationship. If you came looking for one word and found four, that is not sloppiness on anyone's part. Each name describes the relationship at a different level, and the level you pick largely decides how much of it you can do anything about. ## Why the relationship between boss and employee is called several different things No single label has won because the relationship runs on several levels at once: legal, organizational, relational, and developmental. Each field that studies it names the level it cares about and keeps using its own word. Here are the five you are most likely to meet, from the most formal to the most personal. ### The employment relationship This is the contractual layer — work exchanged for pay, governed by a contract, a set of policies, and employment law. It is the name HR and legal sources reach for first, and within its own terms it is exactly right. Its distinguishing feature is that it is identical for everyone. Two people with the same title, the same contract, and the same manager have precisely the same employment relationship, and can still have completely different working lives. This layer sets the floor. It tells you nothing about what gets built on top of it. ### The manager-employee relationship This is the organizational layer, and it is the answer most career sites give. Indeed defines it as the quality of the interactions between an employee and their manager — the interactions that make openness possible, let someone raise things safely, and let them be productive. Older textbooks use the more hierarchical phrasing, superior-subordinate relationship. In an ordinary week, people just say "reporting relationship" or "my boss." What distinguishes this level is that the obligations run in both directions, which is easy to forget when one party writes your review. Indeed sets out both halves: the employee is expected to follow instructions, give input when it is needed, and meet or exceed the performance criteria; the manager is expected to supply the resources and training to do the job, handle the team's administrative duties, and provide the leadership that ties the work to company goals. Neither side can hold up their end alone. The stakes at this level are not subtle. Chron's write-up on boss and employee relationships puts it plainly: a relationship that lacks cohesiveness dampens productivity and is associated with high turnover — the same link a Molloy College business faculty paper examines directly under the heading of job retention. ### Leader-member exchange (LMX) If the question came from a textbook or an exam, this is almost certainly the answer being looked for. Leader-member exchange, proposed by Graen and colleagues, is the main theoretical account of the relationship between a superior and a subordinate, and its defining move is to treat that relationship as a dyad — one manager and one report, developing a relationship out of their workplace interactions over time. What makes LMX useful outside a lecture hall is that it treats quality as a variable rather than a given. High-quality exchanges are described in terms of trust, liking, professional respect, and loyalty: the member puts in more effort and more personal loyalty, and the leader responds by allowing more control and influence. Low-quality exchanges fall back on hierarchical differentiation and the formal rules of the employment contract — the relationship reverts to the floor described above. The research also divides people into an in-group and an out-group. Summaries of the theory describe in-group members receiving greater responsibilities, rewards, and involvement in decisions, along with more access to resources and support, while out-group members get limited interaction and support and stay inside the formal job requirements without the additional recognition or opportunity. That reads harshly, and the part worth holding onto is the part that makes it usable: LMX is explicitly differentiated. The same manager forms different-quality relationships with different people on the same team. Whatever accounts for the difference, it is not the org chart, because the org chart is identical for all of them. ### Transactional and transformational relationships A fourth family of names describes what the relationship runs on rather than where it sits. A transactional relationship is built on exchange — effort, skills, and knowledge traded for rewards — and assumes people work best when goals are clearly defined and results are attached to a visible system of rewards and consequences. A transformational one is relationship-oriented: it works through a picture of where things are heading, a sense of purpose in the work, and a manager who actively helps people learn and grow. Management-style guides such as Valamis's list several more in the same family — democratic, coaching, laissez-faire, servant. The distinguishing feature of this whole layer is that it is mostly your manager's to set, not yours. You will rarely convert a transactional manager into a transformational one. What you can do is work out which one you are inside and stop waiting for the other. ### The mentoring relationship The last name is developmental. What is traditionally called hierarchical mentoring is a one-to-one relationship in which someone more senior guides someone less experienced inside the same organization, with both sides gaining from it. A study of leadership styles and mentoring competencies found transformational behavior positively related to career development, role modeling, psychosocial support, and satisfaction for mentors and protégés alike. The distinguishing feature here is that this one is optional and additive. Your manager is not automatically your mentor. When the two do overlap you have something genuinely valuable, but it sits on top of the reporting relationship rather than replacing it — plenty of people have an excellent manager who is not their mentor, and a mentor two floors away who is not their manager. ## What every version of the relationship has in common Line the five names up and the same three things show through all of them. It is two-sided. Every description above assigns real obligations to both parties; even the most hierarchical framing has the manager owing resources, clarity, and leadership. It is built rather than assigned. The org chart hands you a manager. It does not hand you a relationship, and LMX's differentiation finding is the cleanest evidence of that — same manager, same team, different relationships. It has consequences you can feel. Access to interesting work, to information, to decisions, and to a fair reading of your own performance all travel through this single relationship. That last point is the one worth acting on, because roughly half of what gets built is yours. Before deciding what to change about the relationship, it helps to have an honest read on [what you bring to it](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — cheaper than a year of guessing, and every habit involved is one that can be changed. ## The skills that decide which version you end up with Read back over the five names and notice what is missing from all of them: any account of the person doing the reporting. The structure is fixed. The manager's style is largely theirs. What is left is a set of ordinary behaviors, repeated over months — and behaviors are learnable. **Working with Your Manager** is the skill this whole topic sits inside, and its starting position is the one the labels obscure: this is a partnership with a shared purpose, your job is to deliver your part of it, and disagreeing is allowed. Day to day that means reading which management style you are dealing with and adapting instead of resenting it; meeting one-on-one on a regular rhythm and preparing properly for it; asking for feedback rather than waiting to be given it; getting expectations and your actual decision-making authority agreed out loud; and making your results visible instead of assuming they are already seen. **Communication** is where this relationship physically happens. The "quality of interactions" the definitions keep circling is not chemistry — it is a series of choices. Which things belong in a conversation rather than an email because they are sensitive or complicated. Leading with your main point instead of the wind-up. Listening properly rather than waiting for your turn. And handling the moments most people route around: disagreeing without it turning personal, taking feedback without defending, apologizing cleanly when you were wrong. **Influence** is what carries a relationship past the formal minimum, and it is built on reputation rather than politics — delivering what you said you would, becoming the person known for something specific, volunteering to prepare the document or set the agenda instead of waiting to be assigned, and working out what actually matters to your manager before you go and ask for something. None of it requires authority, which is exactly why it is available to you early. Of the three, influence is the one people most often assume is out of reach without a title. The **free Job Skills Test** scores you on it and eleven others, so instead of working on all three at once you can find out [which skills to practice first](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) — and a low score on any of them names something not yet learned rather than something missing in you. ## Where this leaves you Some of this may already describe how you work — the person who writes down what was agreed, or checks the priority before starting rather than after. None of it asks you to become a different kind of person. A gap here is simply something not learned yet, and the version of this relationship you want is one you can build at whatever pace your current job allows. It also tends to carry more weight as you go, since the decisions that pass through this relationship — scope, projects, promotions — get bigger as your responsibilities do, which is an argument for starting while the stakes are low and the behaviors are cheap to practice. You went looking for what this relationship is called, which is more than most people ever stop to ask about the one working relationship that shapes their days. The useful next question is narrower: which of these behaviors are already yours. ## See where you stand That is a question you can answer in a few minutes rather than guess at. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of everyday work skills: you answer questions about how you handle ordinary situations at work, and it scores you across all twelve skills — working with your manager, communication, and influence among them. It takes about seven minutes, and your results appear as soon as you finish. You come away knowing which of these are already solid and which one or two would make the biggest difference to the relationship this article has been describing. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? The relationship between boss and employee is called the manager-employee relationship - or, in research, leader-member exchange. Here's what that means. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Working with Your Manager. It also relates to Communication, Influence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/relationship-between-boss-and-employee-is-called/ Preferred summary: "The relationship between boss and employee is called the manager-employee relationship - or, in research, leader-member exchange. Here's what that means." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.