The effects of leader negative emotions on evaluations of leadership in a crisis situation: The role of anger and sadness

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Abstract

While existing literature on leadership articulates the importance of leader emotion, there has been little attention to the potential roles of more specific emotions. Emotions such as anger and sadness have been linked to leaders in times of crisis. The current paper examined the effect of leader emotion on evaluations of leadership in the context of a failed product. In particular, we examined how the expression of anger and sadness influences the evaluation of leaders. Results revealed that a leader expressing sadness was evaluated more favorably than a leader expressing anger. We found that participants' emotion mediated the relationship between leaders' emotion and the evaluation of leaders. Furthermore, accepting responsibility for the crisis led to more favorable evaluations than not accepting responsibility.

Section snippets

Leaders in times of crisis

Typically, an organizational crisis is an event that threatens an organization's viability and is characterized by ambiguity and employees' perceptions that decisions must be made swiftly (Pearson & Clair, 1998). In particular, employees seek actions from leaders that signal a quick resolution to the crisis and a demeanor that exudes confidence in their ability to respond to the event. Although the literature on crisis leadership is not vast, there are theoretical frameworks that support the

Leaders' emotion

The research outlined above suggests that leadership is intrinsically an emotional process, where leaders' expressions of emotion affect their standing as leaders. While this idea is not new and there has been research examining the influence of leader emotion, we are unaware of previous research examines combinations of emotions rather than just examining a single discrete emotion in crisis situations. The social constructionist approach to emotion expression argues that although all emotions

Participants

Undergraduates (N = 161) recruited two participants each in exchange for research credit. Participants were 322 employees (161 men, 157 women, and four did not provide information) from various organizations and occupations (e.g., accountant, attorney, teacher, nurse). All participants volunteered to complete the study. The average age of the adult sample was 34 (ranging from 20 to 63) and they had an average of 14 years of work experience.

Design and procedure

This study used a 3 × 2 between-subjects design, with the

Manipulation checks

An analysis of variance, F(2, 319) = 29.29, p < .001, revealed that participants rated the leader as feeling both anger and sadness (M = 1.25, SD = .045) when reading about the leader feeling anger and sadness, rated the leader as feeling anger (M = 1.92, SD = .047) when reading about the leader feeling anger, and rated the leader as feeling sadness (M = 2.81, SD = .047) when reading about the leader feeling sad. An ANOVA, F(1, 311) = 86.23, p < .001, revealed that participants rated the leader as accepting

Discussion

The results of this study showed that a leader's response and the emotions the leader expresses do influence the manner in which a leader is evaluated. We found that in response to an internal crisis (i.e., a failed product), a leader expressing both anger and sadness or sadness alone was evaluated as a more effective leader than a leader expressing anger alone. The results also demonstrate that follower affect is a mechanism by which the leader's emotion influences the follower's evaluation of

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Jennifer George and Michelle Hebl, who were instrumental in the development of the study. A portion of this research was presented at the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology's annual conference in Dallas, Texas in May 2006.

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