Abstract
Several studies examining leader-follower interaction in Greece, a collectivistic culture, paradoxically find that leaders' emotion suppression-related personality traits (attachment avoidance, emotion suppression, emotion control) have positive effects on followers' emotional and work attitude outcomes. These findings have been explained with reference to followers' implicit cultural schemas, interdependence in particular. Yet, this conjuncture has not been directly tested. The present study directly examined, in a field setting, how followers' independent and interdependent (cultural) self-construal moderates the relationship between leaders' attachment orientation and followers' emotion and satisfaction outcomes at the work place. As hypothesized, leaders' higher avoidance was associated with followers' job satisfaction, group cohesion, and deep acting as well as lower negative affect and loneliness for followers higher on interdependent self-construal. The results underline perceptual processes involved in followers' interdependent self-construal in relation to leaders' emotion suppression-related traits.
Highlights
In the last two decades, there has been a significant research interest in processes that can explain how leaders’ emotion-related competencies impact followers’ work outcomes
There was one supervisor–follower group that was excluded from analyses due to data missing at the subordinate level resulting in 49 supervisor-level groups
We find that for followers high on interdependent self-construal, high supervisor avoidance was associated with higher job satisfaction, group cohesion, deep acting (DA)
Summary
In the last two decades, there has been a significant research interest in processes that can explain how leaders’ emotion-related competencies impact followers’ work outcomes. There has been considerable convergence on the view that leaders’ emotions and emotion-related competences impact followers’ work-related attitudes and experience through direct, behavioral, and indirect, perceptive routes (Van Kleef et al, 2012). The present research focuses on followers’ cultural identity and how it can influence the perception of leaders’ emotion-related competencies and followers’ work outcomes. This is in chime with calls for research on leadership identity-related work in a multilevel fashion (Antonakis et al, 2012; Epitropaki et al, 2017)
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