Expressing Regret, Calm, or Pride: Leader Low-arousal Emotional Expressions' Effects on Leadership Perceptions

A main part of a leader’s role involves navigating challenging situations such as less-than-ideal outcomes, decision-making failures, or a difficult market. In these high-pressure moments, leaders may respond with a sense of calm, express their regrets in a natural way, or intentionally demonstrate their pride. Ultimately, the emotion a leader expresses can considerably affect how people perceive their leadership. However, research on these common leaders’ low-arousal emotions has by and large been ignored. Through three studies, this dissertation draws on and extends the implicit theory of leadership emotions (ITLEs) to examine, how low-arousal emotional expressions (i.e., regret, calm, and pride) impact observers’ evaluations of the leaders’ effectiveness (i.e., leader effectiveness, competence, power, confidence) and value-based attributes (i.e., leader sincerity, integrity, humility). In addition, the underlying mechanism - perceived leader prototype violation was investigated. Integrating with the literature on leader gender and leader attributes, this study also examines the moderating role of leader gender and leader attributes in altering the impacts of low-arousal emotional expressions on perceived leader effectiveness. Results support that negative low-arousal emotion expression – regret, could harm perceived leader effectiveness and the effects are mediated by the leader prototype violation, while positive low-arousal emotion expression – pride and calm, could bring positive effects on perceived leader effectiveness. Results also indicate that the impact of these emotions on the perceived leader attributes is limited, in that leader’s pride expression would decrease the perceived leader humility. Regarding the moderating factors, this study found that leader integrity and humility have a moderating effect on leader effectiveness and competence. Future study on gender’s moderating role is encouraged.