Weak or caring? When Sad Leaders Are Perceived As More Effective than Angry Leaders

The literature on negative emotions and impression formation of leaders make contradictory predictions on whether expressions of sadness by leaders will be perceived as more or less effective than expressions of anger by leaders. Drawing from the literature on emotions as social information and a social-cognition approach on leadership perception, we hypothesized that when the social context induces observers to form impressions of leaders’ communal qualities (as opposed to their agentic qualities), leaders who express sadness in reaction to a problematic organizational event would be seen as more effective leaders and receive more endorsement, than leaders who express anger in reaction to the same problematic event. In three experiments we found that when observers were induced to form an impression of a leaders’ communal qualities, they perceived leaders’ that expressed sadness as possessing more communal qualities, than leaders that expressed anger, but not less agentic qualities. Because leaders’ perceived communal qualities in turn positively predicted leadership effectiveness (Study 2) and leadership endorsement (Study 3), observers that were induced to form an impression of leaders’ communal qualities, perceived leaders expressing sadness to be more effective than leaders expressing anger, and preferred a sad leader above an angry leader.