领导感激表达能提高员工的追随行为吗？情绪表达真诚性的作用 postprint

Abstract: Gratitude, as a traditional virtue of Chinese nation, has been widely focused by scholars in recent years. Scholars have begun to shift from a focus on trait gratitude and state gratitude to a focus on the interpersonal interaction outcomes of gratitude expression. A limited number of studies have explored leader gratitude expression on employees’ outcomes toward the organization (including job satisfaction, OCB toward the organization, and turnover intentions), however, there is a lack of research examining leader gratitude expression on employees’ outcomes toward the leader (e.g., followership behavior). To address this theoretical gap, we drew on the dual strategy theory of social rank and the perspective of emotional expression authenticity, and hypothesized that leader gratitude expression has a positive impact on positive followership behavior via perceived leader prestige and has a negative impact on negative followership behavior via perceived leader dominance. Also, we further expected that the above relationship is stronger when employees perceived their leaders’ emotional expression authenticity is high. We tested these hypotheses in an experimental study (N = 184) and a field sample of leader?employee dyads (N = 192). In Study 1, a between-participant scenario experimental design was used to manipulate the independent variable leader gratitude expression with the scenario material developed by Ritzenh?fer et al. (2017) (leader gratitude expression condition vs. neutral condition), and 200 participants were invited to participate in the experimental study. When administering the test, participants will be randomly assigned to a scenario in order to eliminate the effect of their own differences on the experimental results. 184 participants who passed the attention test were retained. In Study 2, we collected 192 leader?employee dyadic data at two time points. At Time 1, employees need to report leader gratitude expression and perceived authenticity, as well as provided their demographic information. At Time 2, employees need to report perceived leader prestige and dominance, and leader need to report employees’ followership behavior. We applied analysis of variance, confirmatory factor analysis, path analysis, and bootstrap methods via SPSS 24.0 and Mplus8.4 software to analyze the data. The results were as follows: leader gratitude expression positively impacted employees’ positive followership behavior via perceived leader prestige and negatively impacted employees’ negative followership behavior via perceived leader dominance. In addition, perceived authenticity moderates the direct effect between leader gratitude expression and perceived leader prestige and dominance, and moderates the indirect effects between leader gratitude expression on employees’ positive and negative followership behaviors through perceived leader prestige and dominance. That is, when perceived authenticity is high, the positive effect of leader gratitude expression on positive followership behavior via employees’ perceived leader prestige is stronger, and the negative effect of leader gratitude expression on negative followership behavior via employees’ perceived leader dominance is weaker. This study has the following theoretical contributions: First, this study examines the effectiveness of leader gratitude expression, and expands the research on the outcomes of leader gratitude expression. Second, based on the dual strategy theory of social rank, we reveal the mediating mechanism of leader gratitude expression on employees’ followership behavior, responding to Yoshimura and Berzins (2017)’s call to examine the influence of leader gratitude expression in the process of interpersonal interactions based on a power and status perspective. Third, this study examined the boundaries of leader gratitude expression based on the perspective of emotional expression authenticity. In the process of emotional expression, many scholars focus on the potency (positive or negative) and intensity (strong or weak) of emotion, but ignore the role of emotional expression authenticity. This study answers the call of Locklear et al. (2022) and enriches the empirical research of emotional expression authenticity.