Article summary with Searing sentiment or cold calculation? The effects of leader emotional displays on team performance depend on follower epistemic motivation by van Kleef a.o. - 2009

Introduction

Epistemic motivation is the desire to develop a thorough understanding of the situation. The main question that the authors of this article are trying to answer is: when do positive versus negative leader emotional displays lead teams to perform better? The answer to this question is based on the emotions as social information model (EASI) that suggests that there are two distinct pathways, namely affective reactions and quality of leader’s performance.

Theoretical development and hypotheses

The social-functional approach states that emotions do not only influence the behaviour of those experiencing the emotion, but also the behaviours of others. Emotional displays evoke affective reactions in others (e.g. through emotional contagion), and they carry information (e.g. about the other’s intentions).

The EASI model (emotions as social information) suggests that there are two paths to emotional influence by leaders:

1. By evoking affective reactions in followers, which influences performance.

2. By providing task-relevant information to guide performance.

• Hypothesis 1: Leader happiness arouses more positive affective reactions than leader anger.
• Hypothesis 2: Leader happiness leads to more favourable inferences regarding the quality of team members’ performance than leader anger. But what works better to increase performance: happiness or anger? That depends on which pathway is used. The authors propose that which pathway is used depends upon the team’s level of epistemic motivation (the extent to which team members desire to develop and maintain a rich and accurate understanding of a situation). When epistemic motivation is high, task-relevant information will work best (anger works best), but when epistemic motivation is low, affective reactions will be more powerful (happiness works best).
• Hypothesis 3: Team performance is strongly predicted by performance inferences when epistemic motivation is high, whereas team performance is strongly predicted by affective reactions when epistemic motivation is low.
• Hypothesis 4: Leader’s anger leads to better performance when epistemic motivation is high, leader’s happiness leads to better performance when epistemic motivation is low.

Methods

First, participants’ epistemic motivation is measured. Then, participants were divided into interdependent teams: they took part in a computer simulation of a military situation in which they had to work together to protect a base. The “leader” (which was an actor) supposedly observed them from another room and gave the teams feedback via video clips (they expressed either happiness or anger). The text was identical in both conditions, but expressions, intonation and postures made the difference. The dependent variables were team performance (number of points in the game), post-task questionnaires (affective reactions, inferences about the quality of performance and manipulation checks). Since teams were very diverse in their composition, the team’s epistemic motivation was calculated as the mean of the team members’ scores.

Results

Hypothesis 1 was supported: happiness resulted in more positive affective reactions than anger. Hypothesis 2 was supported: anger resulted in stronger feelings that the leader was not satisfied with the performance, compared to happiness. Hypothesis 3 was supported: performance inferences were more predictive of team performance in case of high epistemic motivation, while affective reactions were more predictive of team performance in case of low epistemic motivation. Hypothesis 4 was also supported: teams with high epistemic motivation performed better when the leader expressed anger, while teams with low epistemic motivation performed better when the leader expressed happiness. Furthermore, epistemic motivation moderated the effects of leader emotional displays on team performance.

Implications

The implications of this research are as follows:

• Performance feedback should not be given in times of stress, because epistemic motivation is likely to be low in such a situation.

• When epistemic motivation is low, it’s important to ensure that team members are in a good mood.

• In order to maximize performance, leaders should match their emotional expressions to follower’s epistemic motivation.