Purpose This study aims to investigate how leaders’ communication styles, such as expressiveness and verbal aggressiveness, influence employee engagement at both individual and team levels. Moreover, this study examines how affective responses of employees mediate these relationships and how team affective climate moderates them. Anchored in both Leader–Member Exchange (LMX) theory and affective events theory (AET), this research uses a multilevel design. Design/methodology/approach Survey data collected from 363 employees across 64 teams in information technology (IT)/information technology-enabled service organisations operating in India, were analysed using multilevel analysis to examine direct and indirect relationships through mediation and moderation. Findings The results show that leader expressiveness was positively related to employee engagement via enhanced positive affect and that verbal aggression has a negative association with engagement via higher negative affect. At the team level, collective perceptions of expressiveness nurture engagement while aggressiveness reduces it. In addition, team affective climate moderates these relationships: positive climates lessen the negative influence of aggressiveness while negative climates ignite the salience of expressive communication. Practical implications This study underscores the necessity for businesses to focus on leader communication training that fosters expressive, helpful and emotionally intelligent behaviours while mitigating vocal aggression. Organisations may create psychologically safe spaces that increase participation by fostering positive emotions and improving emotional climates of teams. Interventions like coaching for leaders, feedback systems and team-building programs can help leaders communicate more positively, reduce negative emotional triggers and keep employees motivated, healthy and doing well across teams. Originality/value This research provides novel multilevel findings illustrating how leaders’ expressive and verbally aggressive communication styles influence engagement via employees’ affective responses and collective team affective climates. By combining LMX with AET, this study extends understanding of communication as both a relational and emotional event. Furthermore, the research notably differentiates between individual- and team-level mechanisms, uncovering cross-level effects that remained unexplored in previous research. It offers novel theoretical perspectives and establishes a comprehensive framework for understanding the role of leadership communication in fostering engagement in team-oriented environments.
Somu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.