We have emotions but can’t show them! Authoritarian leadership, emotion suppression climate, and team performance

Abstract

How do authoritarian leaders in modern organizations influence work team emotional climate and performance? Defining authoritarian leadership as an ambient, demanding, and controlling leadership style, we conducted a survey study of 252 leaders and 765 subordinates matched in 227 work teams in three large public Japanese organizations. The results indicate that authoritarian leaders are more likely to create a team climate of emotion suppression, which induces a higher level of team emotional exhaustion that negatively impacts team performance. Furthermore, we found that authoritarian leaders’ own emotion suppression enhances the above sequential mediation effects, i.e. the more emotion suppression the authoritarian leader him/herself exercises, the stronger the team climate of emotion suppression, the higher the level of team emotional exhaustion, and the lower the team performance. These findings suggest that leadership effectiveness may be improved if leaders can reduce their authoritarian behaviors and identify appropriate channels for employees to release emotions in the workplace.

“A Two-Edged Sword”: Paternalistic Leadership and Nurses Performance: A Moderated Mediation Model

“…Paternalistic leadership has a favorable impact on employee attitudes in high-power-distant societies ( Schaubroeck et al, 2017 ). In a high-power-distant culture, leaders adopt an authoritative approach that results in improved performance ( Wang and Guan, 2018 ; Chiang et al, 2021 ). Sue-Chan and Ong (2002) discussed that individuals of high-power-distant cultures find assigned goals effective in increasing their self-efficacy beliefs because they believe that assigned goals are communicated from an authoritative source.…”

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