Trust in the leader alleviates the negative effect of leader anger expressions on leader effectiveness
| Date | 02 August 2019 |
| Published date | 02 August 2019 |
| Pages | 1120-1134 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/PR-09-2018-0353 |
| Author | Bo Shao |
| Subject Matter | Hr & organizational behaviour,Global hrm |
Trust in the leader alleviates
the negative effect of leader
anger expressions on
leader effectiveness
Bo Shao
Department of Management, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Abstract
Purpose –Leaders often provide negative feedback to underperforming followers with the intention of
helping improve their performance. However, the anger expression that is often involved in the delivery of the
feedback may cause followers to infer negative intentions and, thus, harm the effectiveness of the leader. The
purpose of this paper is to examine, from a relational perspective, the condition under which the negative
effect of leader anger expressions on leader effectiveness can be alleviated.
Design/methodology/approach –Data were collected from 355 participants in total through two main
studies and two validation studies.
Findings –The author found that leader anger expression in negative feedback delivery had detrimental
effects on leader effectiveness through follower-inferred negative intentions. More importantly, the
detrimental effects of leader anger expressions on leader effectiveness were alleviated when followers had
high levels of trust in their leaders.
Originality/value –Integrating leader emotion and trust literatures, the present research is the first to
examine from a relational perspective (i.e. follower trust) the boundary condition under which leader anger
expressions influence leader effectiveness.
Keywords Trust, Leader effectiveness, Anger, Inferred negative intention
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Providing feedback is often considered an essential element of supervisory behavior
(Leung et al., 2001) because it provides an opportunity for leaders to address followers’
performance–goal discrepancies and help improve followers’performance (Cianci et al., 2010).
However, when leaders provide negative feedback, they often do so with negative emotions
such as anger because of their frustration with the underperformance (Fitness, 2000).
Unfortunately, the extant feedback literature has not thoroughly examined the role of
leader anger expressions in how followers react to negative feedback from the leaders. On the
other hand, in the leader emotion literature, leader anger expressions have been found to create
significant ramifications in the workplace, such as producing neg ative emotions in followers
(Lewis, 2000; Madera and Smith, 2009) and negative evaluations of leaders (Glomb and
Hulin, 1997; Madera and Smith, 2009). Such negative consequences of leader anger expressions
may negate the value of the negative feedback, reducing the effectiveness of the leaders
providing the feedback.
Although leaders can contain their anger in feedback delivery, these attempts may not
always be successful in situations where anger is easily triggered. In addition, in other
circumstances in which anger can instill urgency to push followers to carry out specific tasks
(Lindebaum et al., 2015), leaders may want to express anger, despite the negative consequences
on followers’evaluation of leader effectiveness. Therefore, it is important to understand
conditions under which the negative consequences of leader anger expressions can be alleviated,
so that leaders can create these conditions and ensure that they are effective when delivering
negative feedback to followers. The present research thus aims to address the questions of how
and when leader anger expressions influence leader effectiveness in a feedback delivery context.
Personnel Review
Vol. 48 No. 5, 2019
pp. 1120-1134
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0048-3486
DOI 10.1108/PR-09-2018-0353
Received 19 September 2018
Revised 13 December 2018
11 January 2019
Accepted 19 February 2019
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
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1120
PR
48,5
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