Jacob Levitt, Constantinos Coutifaris, Paul Green, Sigal Barsade (2024), Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance, Organization Science. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17390
Abstract: Leader emotional expressions have profound implications for team members. Research has established that how frequently leaders express positive and negative emotional expressions shapes team member performance through conveying critical social-functional information about team member social worth. Yet, this social-functional approach to emotions has not fully considered how the timing of leader emotional expressions during a team’s lifecycle can also shape the information conveyed to individual team members about their social worth. In this paper, we integrate the social-functional approach to emotions with imprinting theory to propose that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions has performance implications for individual team members through two distinct facets of social worth: respect and status. Specifically, our imprinting framework explains how positive leader emotional expressions during the early team phase have the most beneficial performance implications through imprinting respect in individual team members. We then propose that these positive implications are amplified by more frequent than average negative leader emotional expressions during the midpoint phase. When filtered through earlier positive expressions, negative emotional expressions during the midpoint phase may signal opportunities for respect and status gains rather than respect and status losses. We find general support for our model in a pre-registered four-wave longitudinal archival study of consulting teams at a leading professional services company and a four-wave longitudinal field study at a NCAA Division 1 sports program. Our work highlights that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions is an important performance predictor through social worth.
Description: The most important takeaway of our research is that the timing and ordering of leader emotional expressions across the early and midpoint phases of team life have important relationships with team member performance. During the early team phase leaders should focus on positive emotional expressions to make team members feel respected, which will have beneficial implications for team member performance. In contrast, during the midpoint team phase, after expressing positive emotions early on, leaders should express more frequent negative emotions than average to motivate team members to pursue new opportunities for status gains, which will have even more beneficial implications for team member performance.
