Emotions for a Cause: How the Emotion Expression of Nonprofit Leaders Produces Follower Engagement and Loyalty

Abstract

Although emotion and leadership is a flourishing topic in organizational research, little is known about the actual emotion-related leader behaviors within the context of nonprofit organizations. Through an inductive, multiple-case study drawing from 34 semistructured interviews with individuals who have occupied leader and/or follower roles in nonprofits organizations, a meso-level framework emerges that delineates the mutually strengthening interplay of emotion-related leader behaviors and organizational display norms in the nonprofit sector. These norms favor the expression of positive emotion and proscribe the display of negative emotion. Nonprofit leaders who enact emotion-related behaviors congruent with these display norms generate the follower outcomes of engagement and loyalty. Implications for nonprofit leadership research and practice are discussed.