Due to their authority and strategic position at work, leaders are considered important sources of influence to employees’ work-life and their performance (Farh, Lanaj, & Ilies, 2017). Accordingly, over the past several decades, scholars have investigated the role of leadership and the effects of leaders’ behaviours, particularly on follower’s affective well-being, attitudes, motivation, and performance-related outcomes. Leaders’ emotions play important roles in the quality of leadership as well as followers’ wellbeing and performance (Humphrey, Pollack, & Hawver, 2008). Leaders use emotion to inspire their followers, show appropriate response in a given situation, or respond followers’ work-related outcomes (e.g., feedback; Bass, 1990; Gardner, Fischer, & Hunt, 2009; Lewis, 2000). Thus, previous research examined the effects of leaders’ emotion on their leadership behaviours (Barnes, Guarana, Nauman, & Kong, 2016), followers’ affective well-being (Bono & Ilies, 2006; Sy, Cote, & Saavedra, 2005) as well as performance (Damen, Van Knippenberg, & Van Knippenberg, 2008; Van Kleef et al., 2009).

Despite enriched findings on the effects of leaders’ emotion, we have less knowledge about why and how leaders’ emotion matters in the organisation. Therefore, I contend that leaders’ emotional experiences and displays are essential determinants of their leadership quality, as well as their followers’ work-related outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to examine the diverse forms of leaders’ emotional experiences and their impacts on their management styles, as well as followers.

To examine our hypotheses, I conduct a series of dyadic (leader-member) experienced sampling methods (ESM) to collect the data for five consecutive working days.