Benefits and Costs of Problem-Focused Leader Interpersonal Emotion Management: An Integrative Perspective of Employees and Leaders

Zou Yanchun; Chen Qiyao; Peng Jian; Zeng Xiaoqing

doi:10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240315

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Journal of Psychological Science ›› 2024, Vol. 47 ›› Issue (3) : 630-638. DOI: 10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240315

Social，Personality & Organizational Psychology

Benefits and Costs of Problem-Focused Leader Interpersonal Emotion Management: An Integrative Perspective of Employees and Leaders

Zou Yanchun¹, Chen Qiyao¹, Peng Jian², Zeng Xiaoqing¹

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Abstract

Managing employees’ emotions is important to improve their work performance and achieve organizational goals. Leader interpersonal emotion management, leaders intentional management of employees’ negative emotions, can effectively improve employees’ work attitude and behavior. Does it also positively affect leaders themselves? Previous studies have mainly focused on the positive impact of leader interpersonal emotion management on employees. But few studies have explored the dark side of leaders’ interpersonal emotion management, in particular whether it hurts leaders themselves. This not only limits the academic research on the impact of leaders’ interpersonal emotion management, but also discourage the application of leaders’ interpersonal emotion management in practice. Therefore, based on the Conservation of Resources Theory, as well as the dual path of resource acquisition and resource loss, this study proposes that leaders’ problem-focused interpersonal emotion management (i.e., managing employees’ negative emotions by addressing the problems that evoke their negative emotions) can improve employees’ occupational well-being at the cost of leaders’ occupational well-being.
To test our hypotheses, we conducted a questionnaire survey. We collected three waves of data from leader-employee dyads in Chinese organizations. In the first wave, 400 employees reported their demographic information and evaluated their leaders’ interpersonal emotion management. Two weeks later (the second wave), these employees were invited again to report their emotional exhaustion and emotion regulation ability. Leaders were invited to report basic personal information and assess their emotional exhaustion and resilience. In the third wave, employees and their leaders who had completed the last two rounds of the survey assessed their occupational well-being. Finally, we obtained data from 99 leaders and 388 employees. Reliability analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and multilevel modeling analysis were conducted.
The results of the multi-level analysis showed that problem-focused leader interpersonal emotion management has a significant positive correlation with employees’ occupational well-being and a significant negative correlation with leaders’ occupational well-being. Second, problem-focused leader interpersonal emotion management can improve employees’ occupational well-being by reducing employees’ emotional exhaustion. The above relationship is stronger when employees’ emotion regulation ability is higher. Third, problem-focused leader interpersonal emotion management can reduce leaders’ occupational well-being by increasing their emotional exhaustion. The above relationship is stronger when leaders are high in resilience.
This study has implications for theory and practice. On the one hand, this study expands the research on the consequences of leaders’ interpersonal emotion management and comprehensively explains the resource change process, including resource gain and resource loss, underlying leaders’ interpersonal emotion management, which can help the academic community to further understand how and when leader interpersonal emotion management is beneficial for employees and detrimental for leaders themselves. On the other hand, the results of this study can help the business community to realize the dark side of leaders’ interpersonal emotion management (reducing occupational well-being by increasing emotional exhaustion of leaders). As such, organizations should design practices to mitigate the detrimental effects of leaders’ interpersonal emotion management on leaders themselves.

Key words

leader interpersonal emotion management / emotional exhaustion / occupational well-being / resilience / emotion regulation ability

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Zou Yanchun, Chen Qiyao, Peng Jian, Zeng Xiaoqing. Benefits and Costs of Problem-Focused Leader Interpersonal Emotion Management: An Integrative Perspective of Employees and Leaders[J]. Journal of Psychological Science. 2024, 47(3): 630-638 https://doi.org/10.16719/j.cnki.1671-6981.20240315

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