Employees are sometimes assigned tasks that lie outside their official role. Employees may perceive such extra-role tasks (ERTs) as unreasonable or illegitimate. Grounded in role theory and leader-member exchange (LMX) theory, we conducted two studies that examined how ERTs are associated with supervisor-employee relationship quality and how the ERT assignment is communicated. While supervisor-subordinate relationship quality was unrelated to the likelihood and frequency with which supervisors assign ERTs to employees, employees with low-quality relationships evaluated ERTs as more unreasonable than those in high-quality relationships. Study 1 showed that ERT messages that included a request (vs. command), acknowledgement, explanation, and appreciation were associated with higher quality LMX relationships. Study 2 found that ERT message characteristics influenced the perceived unreasonableness of the task for employees in high-quality relationships, suggesting employees in such relationships are particularly vulnerable to “job creep” and role expansion.

中文翻译：

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“我知道这不是你的工作，但是……”：角色外任务、沟通和领导-成员交换关系

有时为员工分配的任务超出了他们的官方职责。员工可能会认为此类角色外任务 (ERT) 不合理或不合法。基于角色理论和领导-成员交换 (LMX) 理论，我们进行了两项研究，研究了 ERT 如何与主管-员工关系质量以及 ERT 分配如何沟通。虽然主管与下属的关系质量与主管向员工分配 ERT 的可能性和频率无关，但关系质量低的员工认为 ERT 比高质量关系的员工更不合理。研究 1 表明，包含请求（与命令）、确认、解释和赞赏的 ERT 消息与更高质量的 LMX 关系相关联。