Putting leaders in a bad mood: The affective costs of helping followers with personal problems.

Abstract

Although leaders spend considerable time helping followers with personal problems, little research has investigated how such helping acts may impact leaders themselves. Drawing from affective events theory and the helping literature, we examine how responding to followers' help requests with personal problems influences leaders' own affect. As expected, we found that helping followers with personal problems was associated with an increase in leaders' negative affect. The strength of the association between personal helping and negative affect, however, depended on the day and on the leader. Specifically, personal helping increased negative affect less on days when leaders perceived their prosocial impact of personal helping to be high (vs. low). On the other hand, personal helping increased negative affect more on days when leaders also helped with task-related problems. Furthermore, at the between-person level, leaders with high (vs. low) managerial experience were less affected by personal helping. In exploratory analyses, we also investigated how followers reacted to leaders' helping. We found that whereas leader task-related helping was associated with follower perceptions of leader work engagement, leader personal helping was not. Additionally, helping with personal problems detracted from followers' increased perceptions of work engagement derived from leaders' task-related helping. Specifically, followers rated leaders who helped with task-related problems as more engaged on days when these leaders provided less (vs. more) personal helping. We discuss implications for research on helping and leadership.

Too much to know? The cognitive demands of daily knowledge seeking and the buffering role of coworker contact quality.

“…They were removed from the final sample because at least three observations per person are recommended to appropriately model within-individual variations and to obtain a representative experience of the employee (Beal et al, 2013). Further, this approach is aligned with common practices in similar daily diary designs (e.g., Gabriel et al, 2018;Lanaj & Jennings, 2020). Thus, the final sample consisted of 189 employees (Level 2) who provided 1,612 day-level observations (Level 1), rendering a compliance rate of 85% (i.e., 1,612 / [189 × 10]).…”

Network Structure of Affective Communication and Shared Emotion in Teams

“…Both explicit and implicit emotional contagion mechanisms suggest that the length and frequency of affective interactions among individuals can influence the extent to which they share emotion [ 25 ]. More specifically, these mechanisms suggest that the longer and the more frequently team members participate in affective interactions or observe each other’s emotional expression, the more likely that they will feel similar and thus result in shared emotion or emotional convergence.…”

Followers' unclear demands during the COVID‐19 pandemic can undermine leaders' well‐being: A moderated mediation model from an entrapment perspective

“…However, helping followers can bring negative implications on leaders' well‐being as interpersonal helping could generate costs for helpers (Bolino & Grant, 2016 ). For example, Lanaj and Jennings ( 2020 ) showed that leaders responding to followers' personal requests can increase leaders' negative affect. In light of the above, we seek to understand how unclear demands from followers during the COVID‐19 can affect leaders' well‐being and use the defeat‐entrapment theory (Gilbert, 2006 ; Taylor et al, 2011 ) to guide our theorising and empirical examination.…”

“…exhibition of positive leadership, answering followers' personal requests) consume leaders' personal sources, thus resulting in lower levels of well‐being (e.g. Lanaj & Jennings, 2020 ; Lin et al, 2019 ). We go beyond a resource perspective and focus on leaders' perception by showing that followers' unclear demands can cause leaders to cognitively view the situation as aversive and feel trapped in their responsibilities.…”