Clearing the Emotional Fog: The Downward Impact Mechanisms and Effects of Leader Emotional Unpredictability

Information asymmetry in organizational communication often deprives leaders' emotional expressions of clear situational cues, making it difficult for subordinates to predict those expressions. Existing research has mostly focused on the effects of leaders' predictable emotional expressions on subordinates, with less attention paid to unpredictable emotional expressions. Based on the social information theory of emotion, this research reveals two pathways through which leader emotional unpredictability affects subordinates: leader emotional unpredictability increases subordinates' cognitive confusion and anxiety, which in turn affects their avoidance behavior toward the leader and task performance; when leaders and subordinates are in the early stage of relationship building, the indirect effect of the cognitive pathway is strengthened. The critical incident technique, scenario-based...