ABSTRACT

The question of how leaders’ expressions of anger influence employees have been the subject of considerable scholarly debate. So far, however, research on the consequences of angry leadership has predominantly focused on the effects of supervisor expressions of anger, neglecting the potential influence of higher-level managerial anger. In this study, we integrate the emotions as social information theory with the adapted elaboration likelihood model to examine how manager anger trickles down across organizational hierarchical levels (i.e., managers, supervisors, and employees) to affect employee moral behaviour. Results of a multi-source field study conducted in Chile demonstrate that perceptions of manager moral behaviour and supervisor servant leadership serially mediate a negative relationship between manager anger and employee moral behaviour. Furthermore, counter to our predictions, trait negative affectivity of supervisors did not moderate the trickle-down relation of manager anger on employee moral behaviour. Our research elucidates the process by which manager anger can “set the tone” in an organization and trickle down across hierarchical levels to predict the moral behaviour of employees.

摘要

领导者的愤怒表达如何影响员工的问题一直是学术界争论的主题。然而，到目前为止，关于愤怒领导的后果的研究主要集中在主管表达愤怒的效果上，而忽略了高层管理者愤怒的潜在影响。在这项研究中，我们将情绪作为社会信息理论与经过改进的细化可能性模型相结合，以检验经理的怒气如何在组织层次结构级别（即经理，主管和员工）中滴落而下，从而影响员工的道德行为。在智利进行的一项多来源实地研究的结果表明，对经理道德行为和上司仆人领导的看法系列地调解了经理愤怒与员工道德行为之间的消极关系。此外，与我们的预测相反，主管的特质负面影响并不能缓解经理人对员工道德行为的愤怒trick滴关系。我们的研究阐明了经理人的愤怒可以“定下基调”的过程，并在各个层次上进行细化以预测员工的道德行为的过程。