The emotional link: Leadership and the role of implicit and explicit emotional contagion processes across multiple organizational levels

Emotional contagion processes influence a wide range of organizational and leadership outcomes. In this paper, I review emotional contagion research as it relates to multiple levels of analysis within an organization and discuss the extent to which this process can be managed by leaders. The review begins with an explanation of the processes underpinning the emotional contagion process, highlighting the neurological mechanisms that give rise to implicit and explicit forms of emotional contagion. In the following section, I discuss some individual differences that moderate the experience of these two forms of emotional contagion. Subsequently, I review how emotional contagion processes impact leadership outcomes at the interpersonal, group and finally, organizational levels. The purpose of the current review is threefold. The first is to refine understandings of the emotional dynamics of leadership influence from a neurological perspective, highlighting how implicit and explicit emotional contagion underpins much of leader-follower interactions. Second, the review extends on conceptualizations of emotional contagion in leadership interactions often captured at the interpersonal level, and illustrates how the process is relevant in influencing group level organizational leadership outcomes. Third, the review also highlights themes emerging from this area of research, and concludes with directions for further research. Ultimately, the review aims to show how emotional contagion processes are implicated as the ‘emotional links’ across multiple levels in organizations and organizational leadership.     

What goes around comes around: How meso-level negative emotional contagion can ultimately determine organizational attitudes toward leaders

We present a follower-centric model of leadership that integrates multiple levels of analysis, and includes emotional contagion as a key meso-level process. In our model, leadership at the individual level is manifested in terms of the leader's favoritism toward members and affective displays. Drawing upon affective events theory, we argue that member perceptions of a leader's behaviors and member attributions of insincerity result in negative emotions. Through a process of emotional contagion, the negative emotions then spread to other individuals in the group. These are in turn reflected in the group's affective climate and trust climate, and also in the quality of leader-member and team-member relationships. In the end, this results in organizational-level disapproval of the leader and cynicism towards the leader. Included as moderators in the model are task interdependence, the temporal context, reward systems, emotional labor requirements, organizational culture, and power distance. We conclude with a discussion of boundary conditions, and implications of our model for research, theory, and practice.     

Emotional labor and leadership: A threat to authenticity?

Building on the emotional labor and authentic leadership literatures, we advance a conceptual model of leader emotional displays. Three categories of leader emotional displays are identified: surface acting, deep acting and genuine emotions. The consistency of expressed leader emotions with affective display rules, together with the type of display chosen, combines to impact the leader's felt authenticity, the favorability of follower impressions, and the perceived authenticity of the leader by the followers. Emotional intelligence, self-monitoring ability, and political skill are proposed as individual differences that moderate leader emotional display responses to affective events. We also look at followers' trust in the leader and leader well-being as key outcomes. Finally, we explore the influence on leader emotional labor of contextual dimensions of the environment, including the omnibus (national and organizational culture, industry and occupation, organizational structure, time) and discrete (situational) context. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Leadership, affect and emotions: A state of the science review

This paper presents a selective, qualitative review of affect, emotions, and emotional competencies in leadership theory and research published in ten management and organizational psychology journals, book chapters and special issues of journals from 1990 to 2010. Three distinct themes emerged from this review: (1) leader affect, follower affect and outcomes, (2) discrete emotions and leadership, and (3) emotional competencies and leadership. Within each of these themes, we examine theory (construct definition and theoretical foundation) and methods (design, measurement and context) and summarize key findings. Our findings indicate that the study of affect and emotions in leadership fares well with regard to construct definitions across the first two themes, but not in the last theme above. Design and measurement issues across all three themes are a little less advanced. One serious gap is in a lack of focus on levels-of-analysis theoretically and methodologically. Our review concludes with recommendations for future theoretical and empirical work in this area.     

What is strategic leadership? Developing a framework for future research

We attempt to bring clarity to the concept of strategic leadership and guide its development by reviewing and synthesizing the existing management literature on how top managers and board directors influence organizations. We propose a new definition of strategic leadership and offer a framework organized around the essential questions of what strategic leadership is, what strategic leaders do, why they do it, and how they do it. To answer these questions, we organize our review around the eight functions strategic leaders serve, the key attributes of strategic leaders, the theories scholars have used to relate these functions and attributes to outcomes, contextual factors, and the organizational outcomes that strategic leaders affect. We identify how strategic leadership research is concentrated in five streams that rarely interact with each other, and offer suggestions for connecting these streams. Our review provides a big picture of what is known about individuals at the top levels of organizations and highlights the key areas where future investigation is essential.     

Bringing the cognitive revolution forward: What can team cognition contribute to our understanding of leadership?

Cognition is a central element of organizational behavior and leaders are seen as key shapers of organizational cognition. Leaders’ influence over organizations often occurs through their influence on the collectives or teams they are leading. Hence, leaders influence organizational outcomes by modeling team cognition. Despite the importance of this relationship for organizational outcomes, there is little integration currently between the leadership and team cognition literatures. To address this gap, we conduct an integrative review. First, we develop a model for leader and team influence based on organizational emergence and leadership complexity theories. Our model makes a distinction between the source of influence over cognition (leader → team, team → leader, reciprocal) and form of cognition emergence (variance reduction, variance enhancement); constraints that shape cognitions that vary in levels (within and between-level, contextual) and focus (individual, interindividual, collective); and leader behaviors (administrative, adaptive, enabling). We apply this model to review and analyze ninety-nine studies in the current literature and then discuss the limitations and future directions drawing on our findings and theoretical model. We contribute a unifying framework of leadership and team emergence that can be expanded and applied to other settings.     

Leader–member exchange and organizational dehumanization: The role of supervisor’s organizational embodiment

This research examined the negative relationship between leader–member exchange (LMX) and organizational dehumanization (i.e., employees’ perceptions that their organization treats them like tools), and specifically the consequences of this LMX–dehumanization relationship on employees’ emotional exhaustion, affective commitment, and voice behaviors. Further, given that supervisors act as representatives of the organization, we argued that these relationships would be stronger for employees identifying their supervisor with the organization (i.e., high supervisor’s organizational embodiment). Across two samples, results showed that high-quality LMX was negatively associated with organizational dehumanization. Further, organizational dehumanization was found to mediate the relationships between LMX and outcomes (i.e., emotional exhaustion, affective commitment, and voice behaviors). Finally, the mediation model was moderated by supervisor’s organizational embodiment. More specifically, the negative effects of LMX on organizational dehumanization and its subsequent outcomes were stronger when leaders were perceived as sharing many characteristics with their organization. This research expands the recent and scarce knowledge on the determinants, boundary conditions and outcomes of organizational dehumanization. Our findings suggest that interpersonal relationships at work and, in particular, very common supervisor-related perceptions should be considered when examining organizational dehumanization.     

Organizational cloud service adoption: a scientometric and content-based literature analysis

This paper takes a scientometric research approach and undertakes a categorized literature analysis to provide a comprehensive and systemic overview of the current status of research on cloud services and their adoption by organizations. We review 52 journals and proceedings of the information systems field to identify and systematically categorize 36 articles on the topic. Our content-based analysis shows that the scarce theoretical and empirical work on organizational cloud service adoption has developed and explored factors that directly or indirectly drive organizations to adopt or inhibit them from adopting cloud services from different perspectives and dimensions. We classify these driving and inhibiting determinants based on the technology organization environment framework Tornatzky and Fleischer (The process of technological innovation. Lexington Books, Lexington, 1990) to provide a structured summary. Based on our analysis and recent cloud evolution in practice, we identify five new research areas, including theoretical and practical phenomena describing determinants and consequences of cloud service adoption in organizations: information technology (IT) related public threat appeals, trust in the technology versus trust in the vendor, bring your own cloud, transformation of organizational identity, and intelligent clusters of IT initiatives. For each phenomenon we provide relevant research questions, potential theoretical foundations, and methodologies to guide future research endeavors in this field.     

Unravelling the relationship between role overload and organizational citizenship behaviour: A test of mediating and moderating effects

Building on the conservation of resources theory and self-determination theory, the present study develops and tests a moderated mediation model of organizational citizenship behaviour, in which a) emotional exhaustion serves as a mediating mechanism linking role overload with organizational citizenship behaviour, and b) supervisor autonomy support moderates the relationship between role overload and organizational citizenship behaviour through emotional exhaustion. Results of a time-lagged study of 144 workers from various Canadian organizations provided support for the hypothesized model: supervisor autonomy support buffered a negative effect of role overload on emotional exhaustion and, indirectly, organizational citizenship behaviour. This research sheds light on the intervening variables that may explain the relationship between challenge stressors and extra-role behaviours. It also provides information on managerial practices that may protect employees’ optimal functioning against an excessive workload.     

Measuring the pulse of an organization: Integrating physiological measures into the organizational scholar's toolbox

This goal of this chapter is to build a bridge between psychophysiology and organizational behavior in an effort to extend organizational theories and enhance the precision of organizational research. The first section describes psychophysiological systems and theories that can inform organizational scholars’ understanding of the biological bases of behavior in organizations. The second section discusses the advantages and challenges associated with incorporating psychophysiological measures into organizational research. The third section speculates on some possible domains where the use of psychophysiological measures may provide novel insights into key organizational phenomena. In sum, this chapter provides an opportunity for organizational scholars to think about how incorporating physiological measures and outcomes into organizational research can deepen theoretical insights and enrich our understanding of human behavior in organizations.     

Emotional strain and organizational citizenship behaviours: A meta-analysis and review

This paper provides a qualitative review and quantitative summary of the relationship between emotional strain and organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB), and discusses five potential moderators of the strain-OCB relationship. OCB refers to discretionary behaviours that benefit organizations and their members. Emotional strain is important to consider because it has a broad impact on employee behaviours and is possibly more fundamental than other forms of strain. However, it has received less attention than aspects of job-related strain, such as job dissatisfaction. Based on the results of 29 empirical studies with 52 unique effect sizes, meta-analytic results revealed a negative relationship between strain and OCB (corrected estimate of the population correlation coefficient, ρ=-.16). Furthermore, this relationship is moderated by the type of OCB (OCB directed at the organization vs. that directed at individuals), type of organization (private vs. public), publication status (published vs. unpublished), OCB rating source (self vs. other), and type of sample (full-time employees vs. employed students). We present theoretical and practical implications of these findings, including steps that could be taken by organizations to increase OCB and to reduce emotional strain, and suggest directions for future research.     

Phases of the Adoption of Innovation in Organizations: Effects of Environment,Organization and Top Managers1

Multidimensional empirical examinations of the adoption of innovations in organizations, and the influence of factors within each dimension on the phases of adoption, are scarce. This study examines the effects of environmental, organizational and top managers' characteristics on the initiation, adoption decision and implementation of innovation. Using a sample of approximately 1200 public organizations in the United States, we found that while each dimension accounts for unique variance in the adoption of innovation, organizational characteristics and top managers' attitudes toward innovation have a stronger influence than environmental and top managers' demographic characteristics. We also found no difference in the direction of effects of any antecedent, but did find differences in the significance of effects of several antecedents, on the phases of innovation adoption. We discuss the implications of these findings and suggest ideas for future research.     

The private life of CEOs; A strategic leadership perspective

Major events in the private lives of CEOs have been a source of fascination for decades. However, despite gaining traction, studies on the relevant phenomena (e.g., marriage, divorce, parenthood, illness) remain scattered in parallel across disciplines. We thematically review the interdisciplinary evidence on the fast-emerging literature on CEO private life events (72 unique studies) to consolidate our understanding of how private life events can become reflected in the professional domains of CEO influence. Through this approach, we comprehensively intersect empirical progress on CEO life events with key strategic leadership outcomes (i.e., performance, strategy, socio-ethical issues, innovation, governance), allowing us to identify key gaps and highlight inconsistencies. We then propose several research opportunities and challenges to move the field from phenomenon-driven standalone studies to a more coherent research program on the blurred boundaries between the private and professional lives of CEOs.     

Linking perceived organizational support with employee work outcomes in a Chinese context: Organizational identification as a mediator

Perceived organizational support (POS) is viewed as an important explanatory framework for understanding the relationship between employees and the workplace, and is regarded by some researchers as central in understanding job-related attitudes and behaviors of employees. However, less research has taken into account the role of organizational identification, which reflects how individuals define the self with respect to their organization, as a potential influence on such relationships. Drawing on a cross-organizational sample of 238 subordinate-supervisor dyads from the People’s Republic of China, we examined whether organizational identification mediates the effect of perceived organizational support (POS) on work outcomes including turnover intentions, work performance, and organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). Results from the current study showed that organizational identification fully mediates the relation of POS to OCB-directed to individuals, and partially mediates relations between POS and other work outcomes (turnover intention, work performance, OCB-directed to organization). Implications for management theory and practice are discussed.     

The mediating role of leadership and people management practices on HRD and organizational performance

Drawing upon prior research, we identify strategic value and transaction effectiveness as two significant HRD contributions and examine their dyadic effect on leadership and people management practices, and influence on firm performance. Results of path analysis on 138 participants supported the dyadic effect hypothesis. More significantly, we found leadership and people management practices as a significant predictor on the relationship between strategic value and organizational performance, which suggests that organizational performance is affected by the combined effect of leadership and people management practices. A key implication of this research is that where organizations had effective leadership and people management practices, both types of HRD contributions – strategic value and transaction effectiveness – significantly enhanced firm performance.     

Humility: Our Current Understanding of the Construct and its Role in Organizations

Since 2000, researchers and practitioners have shown increased interest in humility. This construct has been studied in disciplines ranging from organizational behaviour to positive psychology, culminating in a wealth of information that can now be analysed and reviewed through the lens of humility in organizations. This review begins by reflecting on existing conceptualizations of humility and presenting a summary of findings that reflects a greater consensus in definitional work than some researchers may realize. It then considers the progress that has been made in measuring humility by specifying key measurement strategies. It next synthesizes existing empirical findings on humility to illuminate the uniqueness of the construct. It also shows that researchers have focused on studying dependent variables that exist at multiple organizational levels and that largely comprise pro‐social and relational variables, emotional well‐being, and learning and performance outcomes. The paper concludes with recommendations for future research.     

A moderated mediation model of the relationship between abusive supervision and knowledge sharing

This study uses the conservation of resources theory to examine the influence of a leader's destructive behaviors by investigating how emotional exhaustion resulting from abusive supervision affects employees' knowledge-sharing behaviors. Using a moderated mediation framework, this study suggests that organizational justice moderates the positive relationship between abusive supervision and employees' emotional exhaustion and attenuates the negative indirect effect of abusive supervision on employees' knowledge-sharing behaviors. The results of this study, drawn from a sample of 202 dyads comprising full-time employees and their immediate supervisors, support most of its hypotheses. The implications and limitations of the study, as well as directions for future research, are discussed.     

Emotionality and leadership: Taking stock of the past decade of research

As scholars continue in their quest to find factors that are related to leadership style, leadership behavior, and leadership effectiveness, we observe a revival in interest with regards to emotionality. As recent research suggests the rising importance of emotional reasoning over intelligence in leadership, the complex phenomena surrounding emotions in the workplace spur studies with contradictory, albeit important, results. The purpose of this review is to unify and integrate research conducted in the past decade that links emotionality with leadership style, behavior, and effectiveness. In conducting this review, we observed four running themes: emotional competencies of leaders (e.g. emotional expressiveness and emotional intelligence), stress in leadership, contagion of positive and negative affect, and the effects of leaders' emotions on outcomes like burnout and performance. On top of taking stock of studies that theoretically and empirically test these relationships, we also summarize literature on potential mechanisms that link emotionality with leadership and highlight directions for future research.     

From bias to exclusion: A multilevel emergent theory of gender segregation in organizations

This article presents a multilevel emergent theory of organizational segregation linking gender bias in performance assessment (a micro-level phenomenon) to gender segregation in organizations (a macro-level phenomenon). Based on an integration of multilevel research, emergence and signaling theory, we propose the following: (a) gender segregation in organizations is an emergent phenomenon that arises from the collective behavior of individuals who express only a small bias in favor of males, in concert with the signals governing promotion decisions and organizational mobility; (b) the emergence of a gender-segregated organization is often unintentional and the bottom–up and top–down processes that produce segregation are difficult to see; and (c) agent-based modeling is especially well-suited for illuminating the dynamics of bias that produce gender-segregated organizations. This multilevel emergent-based theory contributes to the research literature on organizational stratification by: (a) revealing the manner in which micro-level and macro-level forces conspire, oftentimes unwittingly, to produce gender-segregated organizations; (b) providing new and very different directions for future research on gender segregation that rely on agent-based modeling; and, most importantly, (c) moving a 30-year debate over the “real-world” impact of gender bias that continues to occupy the field of human resource management and, most recently, Supreme Court justices on to more fertile ground.     

Imprinting: Toward a Multilevel Theory

The concept of imprinting has attracted considerable interest in numerous fields—including organizational ecology, institutional theory, network analysis, and career research—and has been applied at several levels of analysis, from the industry to the individual. This article offers a critical review of this rich yet disparate literature and guides research toward a multilevel theory of imprinting. We start with a definition that captures the general features of imprinting across levels of analysis but is precise enough to remain distinct from seemingly similar concepts, such as path dependence and cohort effects. We then provide a framework to order and unite the splintered field of imprinting research at different levels of analysis. In doing so, we identify economic, technological, institutional, and individual influences that lead to imprints at the level of (a) organizational collectives, (b) single organizations, (c) organizational building blocks, and (d) individuals. Building on this framework, we develop a general model that points to major avenues for future research and charts new directions toward a multilevel theory of imprinting. This theory provides a distinct lens for organizational research that takes history seriously.