Bright Side of Leader Emotional Labour: Impact of Leader Emotion Regulation on Employee Outcomes

The concept of emotion regulation has been a major topic of affect-based research in organizational studies. However, it has been studied mostly in service contexts as a form of labour that is stressful and impairs the well-being of service workers. Despite the potential of applying this construct beyond service occupations with a focus on the beneficial aspects of it, the call for expansion of this literature has largely been unattended. Although studying emotions of leadership opens a wide range of opportunities, extension of emotional labour research is distinctly underdeveloped in this area. In response to this state of affairs, my research empirically explores the bright side of leaders emotion regulation in leadership context. Drawing on emotional labour theory, affective events theory (AET), emotional expressivity of leadership theories, and conservation of resources (COR) theory, I propose that leaders emotion regulation may, in fact, result in beneficial employee outcomes without harming leaders well-being. In order to support my hypotheses, I conducted two studies. At an interpersonal level, study 1 ( cross-sectional, n = 175) examines the beneficial impact of employee perceptions leader emotion regulation strategies (viz. surface acting and deep acting) on key employee outcomes. The results support the hypotheses that 1) employee perception of leader deep acting was favourably related to employees job satisfaction and perceived leadership effectiveness and 2) these relationships were mediated by employee perception of leader authenticity. The purpose of study 2 (daily experience sampling, n = 81) was to test the other key argument of this research: that while surface acting can impair well-being, leader deep acting does not necessarily hinder their personal well-being. As hypothesized, I found a significant positive relationship between leader surface acting and emotional exhaustion, and the relationship was mediated by daily emotional dissonance. However, as expected, leader daily deep acting was not related to their daily well-being outcomes of emotional dissonance and emotional exhaustion. In addition to theoretical contribution by extending the study of emotion regulation in leadership with a focus of the beneficial aspect of it, this research offers important implications for the practicing managers and human resource management (HRM) functions.