Emotionally Unpredictable Leaders Harm Team Performance Because They Create Intra-team Power Struggles

The emotional displays of leaders can influence, guide, and inspire the teams they lead. But what happens when leaders' emotions cannot be logically anticipated based on the situation? Here we integrate the social-functional approach to emotion with theorizing on leadership and power in teams to shed light on the effects of leader emotional unpredictability on intrateam power struggles and performance. We propose that leader emotional unpredictability introduces uncertainty about the allocation of resources within the team, which may cause members to vie with one another to safeguard their personal power, particularly when members receive individual-level rather than team-level bonuses. These power struggles in turn harm both individual and team performance. Using a multi-method approach, we find support for our model in a scale-validation study, a field study of 246 retail teams, a laboratory study with a confederate actor, and an online experiment. The findings inform understanding of the role of emotions in leadership and power dynamics in teams, and point to boundary conditions of the functionality of emotional expressions in leading teams.