With a frown or a smile: How leader affective states spark the leader‐follower reciprocal exchange process

Abstract

Despite evidence that affect shapes perceptions of workplace relationships, the role of affect in the reciprocal exchange process of leader-member exchange (LMX) theory is often overlooked. We argue that this is likely due to a continued focus on global assessments of LMX quality, rather than examination of the reciprocal, interlocked actions and reactions that take place daily between members of the dyad. A leader's affective state may indeed spark this reciprocal exchange process on a daily level and ultimately shape the state of the leader-follower relationship.In this study, we integrate LMX theory and emotions-associal-information (EASI) theory to examine how the leader's negative and positive affective states uniquely contribute to the reciprocal exchange process. In doing so, we advance understanding of the distinction of state LMX as well as the unique process for leader's negative affective state within the reciprocal exchange process. Using a 15-day experience sampling methodology study of 76 leader-follower dyads, we find that a leader's positive and negative affective states transmit effects along the affective and inferential paths posited in EASI theory to influence follower performance on a daily basis. Interestingly, a leader's positive affective state is stronger along the affective path and a leader's negative

The experimental research on leaders and cooperative behavior

“…We found that the existence of leaders does not always improve the level of individual cooperation. This conclusion is consistent with the previous research conclusion of leader style (Tong, 2020;Zeng et al, 2020;Bartels et al, 2022). By controlling the investment of leaders, we found that only when the leader's investment is close to all his capital the employees will improve the level of cooperation and increase the investment.…”

“…This setting is consistent with settings (Tong, 2020) and (Bartels et al, 2022) except for the investment of leaders. We set the leader's investment in the group project to be randomly selected from 42 to 45G$ to reflect the power of the leader's role model.…”

“…Information feedback draws on the personal information feedback of Sell and Wilson (1991) and adopts "partner design" (Weimann, 1994;Bigoni and Suetens, 2012;Irlenbusch and Rilke, 2013), that is, setting (O'Neill and Mclarnon, 2018;Yang et al, 2021) keep the grouping and individual number unchanged throughout the experiment, and setting (Li et al, 2016;Liang and Fan, 2020) regroup every 10 periods. By comparing setting (Tong, 2020;Yang et al, 2021;Bartels et al, 2022) with setting (O'Neill and Mclarnon, 2018), our study analyzes the impact of leader type on individual and group investment, and analyses the mechanism of leader type change on individual investment level and overall group performance by comparing setting (Li et al, 2016;Liang and Fan, 2020).…”

“…The intermediary effect test of cooperative belief draws lessons from the analysis methods of Preacher and Kelley (2011), and the results of path analysis are shown in Table 10 and Figure Bartels et al, 2022). When considering the horizontal reference point of investment and cooperation belief, it is found that the correlation between individual investment and the horizontal reference point of investment is no longer significant (regression coefficient is -0.045, t value is -1.16), but significant with cooperation belief (regression coefficient is 0.903, t value is 23.33).…”

“…Tong (2020) explored the mechanism of its impact on the innovation climate from the perspective of leadership style and defined leadership style as transactional leadership and transformational leadership. There is also literature on the effects of leaders' negative emotions on employee performance and deviant behavior (Bartels et al, 2022). Research on self-sacrificial leadership has shown that this leadership type can stimulate the identification and trust of members in the organization (Yang et al, 2021), enable employees to cooperate with leaders actively, promote organizational change (Li et al, 2016), make prosocial behavior decisions, and even sacrifice their interests for the organization (Liang and Fan, 2020); Zeng et al (2020) studied the role of leaders in guiding employees' decisionmaking behavior from the perspective of leader role models, and divided leaders into two types: "good" leaders and "bad" leaders.…”