Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance

Leader emotional expressions have profound implications for team members. Research has established that how frequently leaders express positive and negative emotional expressions shapes team member performance through conveying critical social-functional information about team member social worth. Yet, this social-functional approach to emotions has not fully considered how the timing of leader emotional expressions during a team’s lifecycle can also shape the information conveyed to individual team members about their social worth. In this paper, we integrate the social-functional approach to emotions with imprinting theory to propose that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions has performance implications for individual team members through two distinct facets of social worth: respect and status. Specifically, our imprinting framework explains how positive leader emotional expressions during the early team phase have the most beneficial performance implications through imprinting respect in individual team members. We then propose that these positive implications are amplified by more-frequent-than-average negative leader emotional expressions during the midpoint phase. When filtered through earlier positive expressions, negative emotional expressions during the midpoint phase may signal opportunities for respect and status gains rather than respect and status losses. We find general support for our model in a preregistered four-wave longitudinal archival study of 9,968 team members on 234 consulting teams at a leading professional services company and a four-wave longitudinal field study at a NCAA Division 1 sports program including 245 student-athletes and 86 coaches on 20 varsity teams. Our work highlights that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions is an important performance predictor through social worth.