Leader Emotional Complexity and Employee Creativity: An Emotions-as-Social-Information Perspective

Much research has examined how one’s emotions shapes one’s creative work behavior, but we propose the equal importance of studying how leaders’ emotions relates to one’s creative work behavior because interactive contemporary workplaces pervasively expose employees to others’ emotions. The emotions-as-social-information theory posits that others’ emotions serve as social information that primes one to adopt certain cognitive processing styles. We contend that leaders’ expression of emotional complexity (a mix of positive and negative emotions) exposes followers to contradictions and positively predicts followers’ dialectical thinking, especially in followers who have higher other emotional awareness that enhances their adeptness at processing others’ emotions. We also expect dialectical thinking to predict creative work behavior, more positively when followers perceive a stronger error management climate that offers them greater psychological safety to experiment with creative ideas. Data from a lab experiment (n = 109) and a lagged-wave multisource field study (n = 392 followers; 132 leaders) supported most of the hypotheses, except error management climate was a substitution instead of an intensification moderator, such that follower dialectical thinking positively predicted their creative work behavior only when error management climate was weaker. We discuss the implications, alternative explanations, limitations, and future directions.