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

摘要： 基于资源保存理论,提出问题导向领导人际情绪管理（leader interpersonal emotion management, LIEM）对员工与领导的差异化影响,揭示问题导向领导人际情绪管理的收益（提升员工工作幸福感）与代价（降低领导工作幸福感）。研究对99份领导与388份员工的嵌套数据进行多水平分析,结果表明：在个体层,员工感知的问题导向LIEM通过缓解员工情绪枯竭,提升员工工作幸福感;员工情绪调节能力强化上述积极影响。在领导层,问题导向领导情绪管理会加剧领导情绪枯竭,降低领导工作幸福感;领导复原力削弱上述消极影响。

关键词: 领导人际情绪管理, 情绪枯竭, 工作幸福感, 复原力, 情绪调节能力