How the boss's "right hand" becomes the group's "go-to": Leader-member exchange as a heuristic cue for everyday asks

Prevailing theories suggest that workplace needs are allocated by matching specific problems to specific coworkers-either by approaching those best suited to address a given issue or by approaching others based on interpersonal relationships and affect. Yet, in most workplaces, coworkers can identify a particular employee who seems to function as the "go-to" person across people and problems, a pattern that is difficult to explain through careful matching alone. Our work addresses this puzzle by examining how such roles can heuristically emerge and become concentrated on certain employees. Drawing on qualitative data, we argue that workplace go-tos can be a byproduct of repeated, everyday help-seeking decisions in which reliance on decision shortcuts leads some employees to become the disproportionate answer when coworkers ask themselves, "Who can help me with this?" Integrating research on heuristics in decision making, we propose that coworkers often rely on an imitate-the-successful shortcut, substituting the complex judgment of who is best positioned to help with the simpler question, "Who does the boss go to?" Over repeated decisions, this process may bias selection toward employees with strong leader-member exchange relationships, inadvertently casting them as go-tos. We argue that while this concentration of reliance should facilitate performance, it also creates conditions that wear employees down. We test these predictions across three studies-an experiment, a vignette-based decision task, and a field study with employee-coworker-supervisor triads. Our work introduces a new lens for understanding how important roles may emerge through cue-based, heuristic processes and complicates assumptions about the uniformly positive consequences of high-leader-member exchange relationships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).