Who's more powerful? King vs. knight: Relative influence of CEO vs. team leader on emotional contagion and performance

Abstract

Organizations are neither isolated nor insulated from emotional display. This paper examines the emotional contagion between a leader and followers and its impact on performance, and tries to answer the question of "What should leaders do, express positive emotions or negative emotions?". I test the emotional contagion effects of leader-follower relationship, using two contextual variables - organizational and team performance - and take the different hierarchical position of leaders into consideration. Moreover, this paper determines in which circumstance among four scenarios described in the paper the followers converge emotionally more to CEO vs team leader. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.