Integrating Emotional Contagion into Leadership Theorizing: Development and Validation of the Leader Awareness of Holistic Contagion Scale

While the literature acknowledges the importance of emotion management for effective leadership, no leadership theory embeds the management of contextual emotions that involuntarily spread among multiple workplace stakeholders (i.e., holistic emotional contagion) and are jointly intertwined with leaders’ actions. The present research aimed to: (1) include emotional contagion into leadership theorizing and assess the cross-country validity of the accompanying measure (Leader Awareness of Holistic Contagion Scale; LAHCS), and (2) examine the LAHCS’ convergent, discriminant and nomological/criterion validity. Data (Study 1) from 1454 Italian employees supported the LAHCS construct and convergent validity with multiple leadership scales and discriminant validity against group-member-prototypicality. Data (Study 2) from the U.S. (N = 400) and Italy (N = 186) supported measurement invariance. SEM model results suggest that leaders’ awareness of holistic contagion and their orientation to manage contagion are associated with higher followers’ commitment and leadership satisfaction. Interestingly, the leader’s engagement in active exploration of contagion exchanges and their awareness of the leader–follower emotional distance is associated with followers’ higher burnout, lower commitment and leadership dissatisfaction. In conclusion, our cross-country findings support the LAHCS validity and reveal that leaders who are aware of workplace emotional traffic are appreciated. Notably, if they attempt to actively explore this traffic or are aware of followers’ emotional distance, then the situation becomes likely intrusive and uncomfortable, resulting in followers’ dissatisfaction, poor commitment and distress. For scholars and practitioners alike, our findings provide a leadership conceptual framework, including emotional contagion as a springboard to the understanding of some apparently inconvenient truths about emotions and leadership.