Leader interpersonal emotional regulation in a context of threat: a polycontextual approach

Interpersonal emotion regulation theory (Niven et al., 2009) has received growing attention in recent years. While the primary purpose of IER is to alter affect, most recently, scholars have argued that IER can serve instrumental purposes beyond hedonistic goals such as improving performance (Vasquez et al., 2020). However, scholarship on how leaders’ IER relates to followers’ behavioural intentions is scarce, representing a critical gap in IER research, given that negative affect adversely influences followers’ behavioural intentions. Theoretically, such an examination shifts the empirical focus of IER beyond hedonistic goals towards a functional perspective of IER in leveraging instrumental outcomes. The aim of this thesis is three-fold: to develop and test a conceptual model to examine whether leaders’ IER relates to followers’ behavioural intentions, to explore the key psychological mechanisms that underpin this focal relationship, and to understand the contextual factors that may act as boundary conditions. Overall, the four studies presented in this thesis support the hypotheses relating to the indirect effects of trust and affect in relationship between leaders’ IER and followers’ behavioural intentions. I present results regarding the relevance of the interpersonal process as key to understanding how followers intend to behave in response to leaders’ IER. In addition, my findings support the view that the relationship between leaders’ IER and followers’ trust, affect, and behavioural intentions varies depending on the environmental, relational, and person- contextual conditions. Such an examination will contribute to enhancing the explanatory potential surrounding the IER-behavioural intentions relationship and, in doing so, lay the foundations for new and refined context-bound theories of IER and contextualised explanations of IER on followers’ responses. Recommendations are made for leaders using IER within a crisis context.