Leader-facilitated emotion management and perceived effectiveness: moderating roles of leader gender and culture

ABSTRACT

Leader-facilitated emotion management (LEM), or behaviour aimed at helping followers regulate their negative emotion, is a key aspect of many leadership styles, yet expectations for such behaviour are likely to vary based on a leader’s gender and culture. Using archival multi-source data from a third-party provider of leadership development programmes, this study examines the cultural value of gender egalitarianism (GE), or the degree of gender role7 differentiation in a society, as a moderator of gender-based and LEM-based differences in leader effectiveness ratings. The positive relationship between LEM behaviour and leader effectiveness ratings was stronger in countries characterized as high (vs. low) on GE practice. LEM behaviour, leader gender, and country-level GE practice also exhibited a three-way interaction in relation to leader effectiveness ratings: In countries low in GE practice, the ‘boost’ in effectiveness ratings associated with high LEM behaviour was greater for female leaders than for male leaders. In countries high in GE practice, the ‘penalty’ associated with low LEM behaviour was greater for male leaders than for female leaders.

KEYWORDS:

• Leadership
• emotion
• gender
• egalitarianism
• culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. BENCHMARKS® is a registered trademark of the Center for Creative Leadership.

2. The database did not include information on the primary mode of participants’ work (e.g., face-to-face, virtual, hybrid), but these data were collected before the sharp increase in virtual work that occurred during the pandemic.

3. We originally planned to test these hypotheses using two different measures of leader effectiveness: the current performance measure as well as a 3-item measure of perceived promotability (also peer-rated). However, the effects of LEM, gender, and the gender x LEM interaction on promotability ratings did not vary significantly across nations, preventing the examination of cross-level moderators (Aguinis, Gottfredson, and Culpepper 2013). The results are therefore omitted from the remainder of the manuscript for the sake of parsimony; however, they are available upon request from the first author. It is also worth noting that, across countries, the average relationship between LEM and peer ratings of promotability was significant and positive (β = .31, p < .001) (across countries), but leader gender and the gender x LEM interaction were not significantly related to the promotability ratings.