Emotions and Leadership: Volume 15

Based on the situated focus theory of power, this chapter empirically investigates the relationship between an individual’s organizational power position and emotion recognition accuracy (ERA), and it examines individuals’ stress experiences at work as a boundary condition for this relationship.

Survey data were collected in a field sample of 117 individuals employed across various organizations in Germany. We used an established, performance-based test of ERA and applied hierarchical regression analysis to examine our model.

An individual’s power was negatively related with his or her ability to decipher others’ emotional expressions among individuals experiencing higher work stress, whereas this relationship was not significant for participants with lower stress.

Although the cross-sectional study design and data collection within one country are relevant limitations, the findings promote a better understanding of the complex relationship between power and ERA.

Given the relevance of accurate emotion perception, the results indicate that stressful work environments may be an important risk factor for organizational power holders’ personal and professional success.

The findings advance the literature on power and emotion recognition by highlighting the role of work stress as an important, heretofore neglected boundary condition that may explicate the ambiguous results in prior research.

This diary study tested some propositions to determine the effect of discrete emotions on three dimensions of emotional labor and their consequent effect on leaders and follower’s perception about leaders’ authenticity.

The data were collected from a cohort of city traffic police consisting 69 police officials at four different time points between their two shifts using experience sampling method. The data were analyzed using the latest technique known as latent growth curve modeling.

The statistical results demonstrated that negative emotions were negatively associated with deep-acting and three forms of emotional labor did not significantly affect followers’ perception about leaders’ authenticity. This study also demonstrated that surface-acting is not significantly associated with leaders’ self-perceived authenticity, but genuine-acting and deep-acting were negatively associated with leaders’ self-perceived authenticity.

This study also offers certain implications for policing officials for improve authentic behavior through daily emotional displays in policing organizations.

This study offers some practical implications for policing officials about emotion regulation strategies during policing practices with respect to the authentic sense of the leaders as well as the followers.

This study offers an insight about how emotional labor affects the perceptions of policing officers about the authenticity of their leaders in the context of traffic police.

This chapter provides a multilevel perspective on the impact of leaders’ emotional display and control on subordinates’ job satisfaction.

This multilevel study investigates how the association of employees’ perceived immediate leaders’ servant leadership and their job satisfaction is influenced by leaders’ emotional labor. Participants in this study included 180 employees and 40 immediate leaders from 40 groups across 16 firms. To avoid of common methods of variances, multiple ratings were employed. Servant leadership of immediate team leaders and subordinates’ job satisfaction were rated by subordinates.

The results showed the positive relationship between perceived team leaders’ creating value for community (one dimension of servant leadership) and team members’ job satisfaction is strengthened by an increase in leaders’ deep-acting of emotions, but is decreased with an increase in leaders’ surface-acting and expression of naturally felt emotions.

This study confirms that a team leader’s emotional labor is likely to affect team members’ job satisfaction, which is also related to employees’ perceived servant leadership. Although how leaders display their emotions in organizations has a significant influence on the association between leaders’ creating value for community and subordinates’ job satisfaction, this study did not identify the explicit mechanisms to explain why this happens.

These findings will enrich the practice of leaders’ emotional management in organizations.

This chapter is the first to provide a perspective to understand leaders’ emotional labor from cross-level analysis. This study also extends our understandings of the effects of servant leadership and its relationships with subordinates’ job satisfaction through an exploration of each dimension of servant leadership on job satisfaction rather than relying on an overall measure servant leadership.

This study seeks to examine how follower’s emotional intelligence influences their emotional reactions to leadership.

Data were collected at two points in time. First, I assessed the emotional intelligence of 157 participants in a laboratory setting. Then, a few weeks later, an experiment manipulating leadership behavior was conducted with same participants. After viewing the leader, the participants’ emotional reactions to their attributions of the leader’s behavior were assessed.

In line with expectations, emotional intelligence was associated with different emotional responses to attributions for the leader’s behavior. Specifically, participants lower on emotional intelligence had more extreme emotional responses to the leader than their more highly emotionally intelligent counterparts.

Although emotional intelligence has received a lot of scholarly attention with regard to predicting performance and leadership emergence, we need to learn more about how it influences emotional responses at work.

If emotional intelligence helps promote less extreme emotional reactions at work, emotional skills should be developed in employees.

This study is the first to examine emotional intelligence as a moderator of emotional reactions to attributions of leadership charisma and intent.

Our study examined whether work engagement follows a predictable pattern over the course of the work week and the role of personality traits in shaping this pattern.

We examined these questions with 131 employees from Canada and the United States who provided daily ratings of work engagement over the course of 10 work days.

Multilevel modeling revealed that employee engagement followed an inverted U-shaped curvilinear pattern from Monday to Friday, peaking midweek. Neuroticism moderated the change pattern of engagement across the work week, such that individuals with higher levels of neuroticism experienced lower and less stable levels of work engagement throughout the work week compared with individuals with lower levels of neuroticism. However, extroversion and conscientiousness did not moderate the change pattern of employee engagement.

These results provide insight into the entrainment of work to the work week and how this entrainment is further affected by the personality trait neuroticism.

Understanding the weekly pattern of work engagement will help leaders’ time work assignments, interventions, and training sessions to keep the levels of employee engagement high.

Our study revealed novel predictors of within-person engagement: weekly entrainment and neuroticism.

This study examines the relationship between in-group identification, intergroup schadenfreude, and the tendency to aggress against out-group members. More specifically, it assesses whether intergroup schadenfreude mediates the identification–aggression link.

This study is a cross-sectional study with the variables studied being in-group identification, intergroup schadenfreude, and tendency to aggress toward out-group members. A total of 123 participants were recruited for this study and questionnaires measuring each variable was administered to participants.

The results from a cross-sectional survey indicate a positive correlation between in-group identification and intergroup schadenfreude and between intergroup schadenfreude and tendency to aggress against out-group members. The results from this study also show that intergroup schadenfreude mediates the relationship between in-group identification and the tendency to aggress against out-group members.

Given the nature of cross-sectional study, claims regarding causal nature of the variables studied could not be made. Further, this study was also contextualized within the political context making expression of schadenfreude more “acceptable” and more easily expressed among participants. Suggestions for further research suggestions are discussed is light of these limitations.

Findings of this study highlight the importance of understanding intergroup schadenfreude in group contexts, and how such emotions can be employed by leaders to instigate, rather than diminish aggressive tendencies against out-group members.

This is one of the few studies to demonstrate that rather than diminishing tendencies to engage in aggressive behaviors, schadenfreude, when experienced within group settings, can instead elicit intentions to aggress against rival or opposing group members.

This study proposes a multilevel framework to test the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationships between positive group affective tone (PGAT) and individual/team creativity.

Data are collected from 122 research and development (R&D) teams (including 305 members and 122 team leaders). Hierarchical linear modeling analyses and hierarchical regression analyses are performed to test hypotheses.

The results show that PGAT facilitates individual creativity via enhanced work engagement, and increases team creativity via team information exchange. Supporting the substituting perspective, we found that the positive indirect effects of PGAT on individual/team creativity were attenuated when supervisory support is high.

Although all variables were collected at the same time and the individual-level variables were collected from the same source, our findings highlight the mechanisms explaining the beneficial effects of PGAT on individual/team creativity, and how supervisory support can substitute for such effects.

In order to make the individuals and teams more creative, the organizations need to promote PGAT via the selection of appropriated leader and members or team social events. Moreover, supervisors support is particularly salient in enhancing team creativity when PGAT is low.

This study is the one of the first study to test the motivational/social mechanisms linking the relationship between PGAT and individual/team creativity, and the competing theoretical perspectives regarding how supervisory support can moderate the PGAT–creativity linkage.

To examine empathy as a trait that influences leadership behaviors, which, in turn, influence group decision-making.

This study uses an assessment center design to maximize internal validity.

The structural equation model shows that empathy strongly relates to both relationship leadership and task leadership, while cognitive ability only relates to task leadership. Both relationship leadership and task leadership exert influence over group task choice and group decisions. Thus, empathy has its major effects through influencing leader behaviors, which, in turn, have distal impacts on outcomes such as influence over decisions.

The study results should be further tested in field settings.

The findings suggest that organizations should recruit and promote leaders high in empathy.

This is the first study to test whether leader behaviors mediate the effects of leader empathy on group decision-making.

The purpose of this chapter is to explore whether and how angel investors’ emotions unfold in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Complementing recent research that has emphasized the financial calculations, we add angel investors’ own emotional arousal to the list of tools that may help them to rate investment opportunities.

Drawing on semi-structured qualitative interviews, we develop a phenomenological analysis of the investment opportunity evaluation process at the level of angel investors’ lived experience.

Our findings indicate that when angel investors use their emotional arousal in evaluating investment criteria, they engage in a developmental process characterized by three elements: subjective validation, social validation, and investment decision.

We illuminate how discrete emotions can complement rational considerations in the opportunity evaluation journey. Capturing the nature of emotion as action oriented, embodied, socially situated, and distributed, we embrace its adaptive socially situated dynamics.

Taking a step toward better understanding of the soft aspects in the relationship development that leads to investments, we hope this study will help not only those entrepreneurs who need funding but also those policymakers who design new incentives that improve the flow of investment into promising new ventures.

We demonstrate how angel investors’ emotions can complement their rational considerations in the investment opportunity evaluation process as they interact with the social environment. Identifying boundary values for the conditions that are necessary and sufficient to advance in the process, we have demonstrated how emotion can serve as a driving or restraining force not only during subjective validation but also during social validation.

The purpose of this chapter is to build a new framework for understanding the antecedents of emotional well-being across different psychological states, situations, and cultural settings. In this regard, we develop propositions regarding causal relationships between self-uncertainty and emotional well-being in the context of social comparison and in two different culture types: dignity and honor.

Based on a literature review, this chapter connects empirical evidence in three areas of research. (1) self-uncertainty literature, (2) emotional well-being, and (3) cross-cultural psychology to propose a new conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between self-uncertainty and well-being across different cultural settings.

The main finding of this chapter is a model that explains how emotional well-being is comprised of three elements of the psychological state, situation, and culture. We seek to explain how and why different cultures and psychological states might have different effects on human emotions. We propose mediators in order to demonstrate how culturally determined notions of self-construal, self-worth, and social order mediate the relationship between self-uncertainty and emotional well-being.

We limited our theorizing to investigate only two broad culture types: honor and dignity. Clearly, there are many more nuances of national culture than this. In addition, our model limited to investigate the role of social comparison among other possible mechanisms to reduce the uncertainty.

The practical implication of our theory is that it enables leaders to gain a more holistic perspective of emotional well-being in their organizations. In particular, in international organizations, leaders have to pay attention to the cultural background of their employees. This, in turn, enables leaders to understand the antecedents of social comparison and emotional well-being in their employees.

This chapter proposes a holistic model that explains the simultaneous effects of different psychological states, situations, and cultures.

This research investigates developmental experiences of executive leaders that result in effective capabilities over their lifetimes.

Qualitative study with 31 C-suite, Vice President, and Director-level executives, Methods used include semi-structured, critical incident interviews, constant comparative analysis, thematic analysis, protocol coding style, inductive coding, and NVivo.

Eight of the competencies from the emotional and social competency inventory – (ESCI) and three new themes, continuous learning, environmental aesthetic, and duality of awareness are identified as key differentiators of effective executive leaders.

The sample consisted of four organizations; study participants represented small- to medium-size private organizations in both profit and non-profit spheres, and the study relied on respondent’s recollections of past lived experiences.

My analysis suggests that this unique blend of competencies, themes, and behaviors enables leadership effectiveness within the healthcare, manufacturing, and professional services industries.

Contributions to leadership development literature through empirically rigorous, scientific study with executive leaders in the field suggest that emotional intelligence competencies are differentiators of executive performance and propose that executive development opportunities include multiple dimensions of emotional intelligence.