Part I: Leaders and Members

The authors of the five chapters in Part I outline empirical studies conducted in four different countries (Australia, Germany, Pakistan, and the USA), where they examined different aspects of the way leaders interact and affect individual employees.

In the first chapter of this volume, authors Anna Faber and Frank Walter outline the findings of a survey-based study they conducted in a large transportation company in Germany to understand the way power affects employees’ “emotion recognition accuracy” (ERA), the ability to recognize accurately what emotion others are displaying though their facial expression. The authors argue that research results to data have been mixed and suggest that more attention needs to be given to the likely effect of contingency variables. Drawing on Guinote’s (2007) situated focus theory of power, the authors argue that ERA is negatively associated with individuals’ power (level in the company hierarchy) and hypothesize that the level of stress they are experience exacerbates this (negative) relationship. To test their model, Faber and Walker surveyed 117 company workers. Their results supported their hypotheses, in that only employees reporting high stress exhibited a negative relationship between position power and ERA. They conclude that their findings highlight an unexplored effect of stress whereby senior leaders struggle to recognize the emotions being manifested by their employees.

In the following chapter (Chapter 2), Muhammad Ali Asadullah, Usman Abdullah, and Ahmad Siddiquei report on the findings of a daily diary study they conducted in the context of a Pakistani police department. In their research, the authors sought to investigate the effects of positive and negative emotion on three dimensions of emotional labor (surface-acting, deep-acting, and genuine emotions) and their subsequent impact on both leader and follower perceptions of authenticity. In this study, 69 police officers completed diary entries twice daily – at the beginning and end of their shifts – over two working days, where they reported their emotions (using the PANAS, Watson, Clark, & Tellegan, 1988) and emotional labor (using scales developed by Grandey, 2003, and Kruml & Geddes, 2000). Both the participants and their superior officers then rated their leadership authenticity (using the scale developed by Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008). The results were that, while negative emotions were found to link to deep-acting and surface-acting to self-perceptions of authenticity, both deep-acting and genuine emotion were found to relate to self-perceptions of authenticity.

The following chapter (Chapter 3) also deals with leadership and emotional labor. In it, authors Yan Li, Khalid Mehmood, Xiaoyuan Zhang, and Corene M. Crossin outline a multilevel field study where they examined the moderating effects of three types of emotional labor (surface-acting, deep-acting, and genuine emotion) on the link between servant leadership and followers’ job satisfaction. The study involved 180 employees and their leaders working in 16 forms in Pakistan. The authors predicted that the positive relationship between leaders’ attentiveness to the needs of their subordinates and the community (via servant leadership) and subordinate job satisfaction would increase if the leaders practice deep-acting or express genuine emotion, but decrease if they practice surface-acting. Employing a multilevel and multisource design, where the leaders rated their emotional labor and employees rated their own job satisfaction and their leaders’ servant leadership, Li and her team found support for the relationships they expected. The authors conclude that the effectiveness of leadership practice of servant leadership depends on the type of emotional labor that the leader engages in.

In the next chapter (Chapter 4), author Marie T. Dasborough found that followers’ emotional intelligence (EI) moderates their emotional reactions to attributions of leadership intentions and charisma. While scholars have studied EI in relation to work performance, they know less about its effects in work interactions. In her study, Dasborough assessed the EI of 157 undergraduates using the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test V2.0 (MSCEIT; Mayer, Salovey, & Caruso, 2002), which is an ability measure of the construct. She then showed participants video and sent them an email requesting them to work overtime. The letter was sent purportedly from either a self-focused (i.e. manipulative) or an organization-focused leader. The participants then completed measures for the leader’s charisma and attributed manipulative intention and emotional reactions (negative/positive) toward the leader. Moderated regression analyses showed that low-EI participants had stronger positive emotions to a charismatic leader and stronger negative emotions to attributed manipulative intention. The finding bolsters the growing theoretical case for the relevance of EI and leadership. Dasborough concludes in the discussion of the practical implications of her findings, which include EI development in employees as a means to facilitate smoother work relations.

In the final chapter of Part I (Chapter 5), authors Denisa Luta, Deborah M. Powell, and Jeffrey R. Spence describe a study where they investigated an important outcome of good organizational leadership, namely work engagement. In their study, they looked in particular at employees’ pattern of engagement over a workweek and predicted that they would find an inverted-U pattern, with high engagement midweek, and lower engagement at the beginning and end of the week. They also predicted that personality (extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism) would affect this pattern, with neuroticism accentuating the effect, and extraversion and conscientiousness attenuating it. In a 10-day daily diary study involving 131 North American employees, they found support for the inverted-U effect and also that the effect was more pronounced for more neurotic employees. It appears that employees with high neuroticism are particularly vulnerable at the beginning and end of the week, something that organizational leaders need to take account of if they keep their employees maximally engaged.

Part II: Leaders and Teams

In Part II, the focus shifts from relationships between leaders and individual employees to the effect leaders have on their teams as a whole. Topics include team identification, team creativity, and leader empathy.

In the first chapter of this section (Chapter 6), authors Raja Intan Arifah Binti Raja Reza Shah and Eugene Y. J. Tee describe a correlational study where they found that intergroup schadenfreude significantly and fully mediates the relationship between in-group identification and aggressive intentions toward out-group members. In this study, the authors conducted an online survey of 123 adult employees in Taiwan where they measured the three focal variables of the study. They also measured participants’ gender and the level of interest in politics as control variables. Using regression analysis and applying the Hayes PROCESS macro for analysis of mediation, the authors found support for all theory hypotheses. The study findings increase the understanding of the impact of schadenfreude, which has previously been viewed as a form of passive opportunism. However, this study shows that the phenomenon has a darker side and can be linked to intention of harm toward out-group members. Although the design of the study did not allow causality to be investigated, practical implications include political leaders being more aware of how they express and communicate schadenfreude to their followers.

In the next chapter (Chapter 7), author Nai-Wen Chi proposes a multilevel framework to capture the mechanisms and boundary conditions of the relationships between positive group affective tone (PGAT) and individual/team creativity. Testing the framework involved collecting data from 122 R&D team leaders and 305 team members. Chi found that PGAT facilitates individual creativity through better work engagement and increases team creativity via team information exchange. Moreover, the results showed that high supervisory support can displace the relationship between PGAT and individual/team creativity, leading to less positive effects of PGAT. This study sheds light on competing theories over how supervisory support moderates the PGAT-creativity link. Practical application of the findings includes promoting PGAT through careful selection of leaders and members and provision of team social events. When PGAT is high, supervisors should step back. Nonetheless, findings also reveal that, when PGAT is low, supervisory support is needed to boost team creativity.

In the final chapter of Part II (Chapter 8), authors Ronald H. Humphrey, Janet B. Kellett, Randall G. Sleeth, Chao Miao, and Shanshan Qian found that empathy predicts relation and task leadership, which, in turn, predicts influence over group task choice and decisions. In contrast, cognitive ability only relates to task leadership. In their study, the authors used a validated assessment center exercise to determine 174 US undergraduate and graduate students’ level of empathy, leadership (task and relation), and influence. Participants worked in groups and measurements were based on peer reports to reduce response biases. Humphrey and his associates analyzed the data using structural modeling and regression and found that empathy as a trait is an indirect but major influence of leader behaviors and eventual outcomes. This finding adds to the new authentic leadership theories, shedding light on the role of the empathy as a distal (trait-like) attribute in leadership. As for practical implications, the authors argue that their results suggest a need for more leaders to receive more empathy training via personal coaching. This would be more suitable than situation-training classes used to develop proximal (state-like) leadership attributes.

Part III: Leaders, Organizations, and Culture

The Chapters in Part III show the interplay of emotions, personal and social contexts, the first among investors in entrepreneurial ventures, the second among different cultures, and the third among organizational leaders.

In Chapter 9, authors Kirsi Snellman and Gabriella Cacciotti describe their phenomenological study of how angel investors evaluate opportunities facing them. They sought to explore how emotions unfold in the investment opportunity evaluation process as investors interact with their social environments. Through interviews with eight angel investors, Snellman and Cacciotti illuminate how emotional arousal of discrete emotions (feelings of excitement, passion, fear of missing out, and trust) acts as a necessary condition for continuation of the investment screening process. That is, while the most important feature of an opportunity for investors was how it scored on multiple rational criteria (idea, team, market, and potential), what was essential is what feeling the opportunity aroused. Moreover, even if both of these criteria are satisfied, a favorable investment decision is not necessarily made. Social validation is also required. This third-party, peer and network consultation appears to validate both the rational criteria and the investors’ emotional arousal. Snellman and Cacciotti show how emotion and cognition are inseparable and how their interplay helps integrate cues from personal validation and social validation. The authors expand on their findings through four rich propositions about emotions and investment decision-making. In this, they create fertile ground for further research and policy design.

In Chapter 10, authors Hamidreza Harati, Neal M. Ashkanasy, and Mahsa Amirzadeh, propose a model to understand the dynamics underlying the relationship between emotional well-being and culture. Harati and his colleagues propose that feelings of self-uncertainty are a source of emotion but that the valence of the emotions that results is determined by the direction of the social comparisons people make. Self-uncertainty is a sense of ambiguity about self, a weakened self-concept, and leads individuals to reduce ambiguity by comparing themselves to others. Social comparison, then, is the natural response to self-uncertainty. They argue further that members of different cultures tend to differ in the direction of their comparisons. Members of “honor” cultures, such as in non-Western countries, tend to compare themselves upward, because they are personal-aspiration oriented and are prone to self-criticism. In contrast, members of “dignity” cultures, such as in Western cultures, compare themselves with downward counterparts because of self-enhancement attitudes. As a result, self-uncertainty is likely to be associated with positive emotional well-being in members of dignity cultures and with negative emotional well-being in members of honor cultures. Moreover, in dignity cultures, this represents a self-enhancement mechanism (downward evaluation and upward affiliation), whereas in honor cultures, this represents a self-criticism mechanism (upward evaluation and downward affiliation). This model is significant in that it proposes a state by situation interaction and, in fact, a culture by state by situation framework. This promises to inform studies of emotions across a broader range of cultures and to provide a more holistic approach to employee’s emotional well-being.

In the final chapter of Part III (Chapter 11), author Jennifer A. Nash outlines how she interviewed 31 executive leaders in four organizations to understand the experiences that contributed to effective leadership over their lifetime. Using semi-structured, critical incident interviews, Nash examined which competencies differentiate the outstanding from average leaders. Three themes emerged: (1) a priority and extended focus on learning and education, (2) an “environmental esthetic” that focuses on creating a positive, caring culture for subordinates, and (3) awareness of others and self, which includes emotional and social intelligence. Nash reports that the extent to which leaders understand the impact their emotions have on others and on the wider organization is a significant differentiator between average and outstanding leaders. She concludes by describing the implications of this for leadership development.