Regulating and emerging: Extrinsic affect improvement and the emergence of leadership

Emotions are powerful tools through which formal leaders influence their followers, whether by overt emotional displays or deliberate attempts to regulate their own and others' emotions. This raises the following question: Can the strategic effort to regulate others' emotions help team members emerge as informal leaders? This work demonstrates that extrinsic emotion regulation-a goal-directed action aimed at regulating team members' emotions-can enable individuals to rise to informal leadership positions. We hypothesize that team members who improve group emotions emerge as informal leaders. This was tested in two studies. In Study 1 (a lab study on 25 ad hoc groups; n = 100), individuals recognized for improving group affect were chosen as informal leaders. In Study 2 (a field study of 43 student groups that worked together for 6 weeks; n = 141), individuals who self-reported engaging in extrinsic affect-improving were recognized by their peers as fostering positive group affect and subsequently were chosen as the informal leaders of the group. Notably, our findings show that the impact of extrinsic affect-improving was above and beyond that of intrinsic affect-improving. These results underscore the pivotal role of interpersonal emotion regulation, specifically extrinsic affect-improving, in the emergence of informal leadership and highlight its unique contribution to leadership dynamics within teams. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).