Employee reactions to leader emotional display strategies in a crisis situation
通过实验研究，比较了领导者在危机中真实表达恐惧、表面扮演和深层扮演三种情绪策略对员工情绪、工作投入和情感承诺的影响，发现表面扮演增加负面情绪，而深层扮演和真实表达效果相近。
Abstract During a crisis, leaders experiencing fear have to decide whether to reveal or regulate their emotions. Drawing on the emotions as social information (EASI) model and employing an experimental vignette study ( n = 159) in the context of a young firm's crisis, we compare employee reactions (i.e., employee affect, job engagement, and affective commitment) to different leader emotional display strategies, namely, deep acting, surface acting, and genuine emotions. Compared with a leader's genuine emotions (i.e., display of fear), surface acting increased negative affect, whereas deep acting reduced negative affect. With regard to the total effects of our mediation model, surface acting negatively influenced employee job engagement and affective commitment, whereas deep acting surprisingly showed no differences to the display of genuine emotions. Our findings indicate that leaders who experience fear may consider revealing this genuine emotion during a crisis rather than engaging in potentially inauthentic emotion regulation strategies.