Leadership Research Summary:
• A closer merging of the literature on emotions with the research on leadership may prove advantageous to both fields. Leadership researchers will benefit by incorporating the research on emotional labor, emotional regulation, and happiness. Emotions researchers will be able to more fully consider how leadership demands influence emotional processes. In particular, researchers can better understand how the workplace context and leadership demands influence affective events.
• The leadership literature on charisma, transformational leadership, leader-member exchange, and other theories have the potential to shed light on how rhetorical techniques and other leadership techniques influence emotional labor, emotional contagion, moods, and overall morale.
• Conversely, the literature on emotional labor and emotional contagion stands to provide insights into what makes leaders charismatic, transformational, or capable of developing high quality leader–follower relationships. This study examined emotions and leadership at five levels: within person, between persons, interpersonal, groups and teams, and organizational wide and integrates research on emotions, emotional contagion, and leadership to identify opportunities for future research for both emotions researchers and leadership researchers.
Leadership Research Findings:
• This study illustrates the value of merging leadership and emotions literatures. The statement that emotions are present in the workplace has been established through empirical research and leadership, and emotions researchers have acknowledged such. It is also safe to say that most researchers agree that employees experience emotional events outside of work and bring their emotions to the workplace. However, little research has been done in this area. It is possible that even something as simple as the loss of a football match may alter the overall emotional climate if the majority of a team or organization supports that football team. These events occur daily and understanding them would benefit both leadership and emotions researchers.
• The review has also shown that other employees can trigger emotional events during the day. Leaders, who can create events though dyadic contact and also through the implementation of policy that may be evaluated positively or negatively by the group, are certainly likely to be a frequent triggers of such events. For example, employees experience a rise in emotional feeling when they receive word that their leader has approved bonuses for them. Conversely, policies that increase workload, extend working hours, or remove privileges may have negative effects on followers even though they do not have direct dyadic contact in the delivery of the message.
• Another consideration that the study worked to explore in this review is that when events occur, or are relived, during the workday, they create emotions for the employee. These emotions are real and affect how employees experience the workday. The literature review on happiness provides some possible ways for organizations to help manage these emotions during the day. However, additional avenues exist for leaders to raise the organization’s level of emotional intelligence, such as, for example, by noticing when colleagues or followers have experienced a negative event, since these emotions must be grappled with, either through self-regulation or emotional labor.
• This review has also discussed at each level the processes whereby individual emotions may be transferred to other employees through emotional contagion. The study’s review found that leaders are susceptible to emotional contagion through their followers. Leaders are not immune to changes in emotions that occur throughout various levels of the organization during the workday. The study’s evaluation of individual differences will hopefully lead to research that investigates the effects of emotions that are derived from leaders’ individual differences and leaders’ susceptibility to emotional contagion via their role in the organization.
• A final contribution of this review is the study’s discussion of the role of the leader in managing the emotions and moods of followers. The discussion in the area of emotional labor is particularly suited for an integration with the leadership field. Unlike much of the research on emotions, this review focused on emotions that occur in the workplace, and we recognize that organizational members often regulate their emotions to fit the organizational environment. Further research on the development and implementation of organizational display rules is needed to understand organizational members’ underlying reasons for accepting or rejecting these rules.