Leader-Follower Emotional Entrainment and Daily Interaction Quality: The Role of Follower Attachment

Abstract

Followers’ high-quality interactions with their leader are a cornerstone of leadership research. Despite a growing understanding of leader emotions as static predictors of high-quality leader-follower relationships, research has yet to pay attention to the micro-level, dynamic interplay of leader and follower emotions for the emergence of daily interaction quality. We develop an episodic emotional entrainment perspective stating that leaders’ expressions of positive (joy, calmness) and negative emotions (fear, sadness) serve as affective events influencing corresponding follower emotions. Over the course of a day, this manifests in affective entrainment patterns (i.e., the leaders’ and followers’ affective states fluctuating in a common rhythm), which in turn predict followers’ perceived interaction quality with their leaders. The strength of the entrainment process, however, is influenced by the follower’s attachment style. We conducted a daily diary study across ten workdays with four measurements each day (N=72 employees; N=497 daily responses). Results of within-day multilevel latent growth models support an emotional entrainment process such that followers’ felt emotions oscillated with the observed leader emotional expression over the course of the day. Within-day changes in followers’ felt high-activated emotions (i.e., joy, fear) predicted perceived end-of-day interaction quality, whereas changes in low-activated emotions (i.e., calmness, sadness) did not. The relationship between leaders’ expressions of joy (fear) and corresponding follower felt emotions at the end of the day via emotional entrainment was weaker (stronger) for followers with high attachment avoidance (attachment anxiety), which in turn was positively (negatively) associated with end-of-day interaction quality.