Hiding or Revealing Negative Emotions? Leaders’ Emotion Regulation in Young Firms During Crises

Abstract

When experiencing negative emotions in a crisis, leaders in young firms face a trade-off between either revealing their negative genuine emotions or employing emotion regulation (i.e., by deep and surface acting) in front of their employees. While the display of negative genuine emotions might induce negative emotions in employees and, hence, negatively influence employees’ job behavior, emotion regulation has been linked to perceived inauthenticity with equally harmful effects. Drawing on the emotions-as-social-information (EASI) model and employing an experimental between-subject design with a hypothetical crisis scenario and a sample of 159 employees, we compare the relationships of a leader’s deep and surface acting and the display of negative genuine emotions with employees’ job engagement and affective commitment, mediated by employees’ affect. Results show that surface acting has harmful effects and deep acting partially reduces employees’ negative affect, but not improves positive affect in comparison to leader’s display of negative genuine emotions. Our findings indicate that leaders who experience negative emotions during crises, should consider revealing their negative genuine emotions rather than engaging in emotion regulation as an exhausting way of expressing emotions.