Affective Dynamics of Leadership: An Experimental Test of Affect Control Theory

Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise 1979, 2007) states that people control social interactions by striving to maintain culturally shared feelings about the situation. The theory is based on mathematical models of language-based impression formation. In a laboratory experiment, we tested the predictive power of a new German-language ACT model with respect to actual behavior and felt emotions in leadership; 60 subjects managed a computer simulated company by communicating with 3 different virtual employees (within-subjects manipulation). Half of the subjects were primed with the concept of authoritarian leadership using a situational interview technique; the remainder was primed with the concept of democratic leadership (between-subjects manipulation). There were 14 dependent variables (leadership categories like praise, criticize, augment salary, etc.). The German impression-formation model correctly predicted 27 of 42 between-subjects contrasts (p < .05) and 56 of 84 within-subjects contrasts (p < .01). Moreover, Euclidean distances of emotions predicted by the German ACT model correlated negatively with the frequency with which the subjects experienced these emotions (correlations ranged from r = −.18 to r = −.61). These results support Affect Control Theory's proposition that realistic social interaction can be predicted by mathematical models of affective consistency.