Leadership Evaluations Based On Performance Information: The Moderating Role Of Follower Mood

In academia, leadership has always been one of focuses of the management and organization behavior research field in the domestic and overseas. And the leadership process about affect and emotions becomes a new trend of leadership theory research.According to the perspective of leadership romance, the study extended the cognitive follower-centric perspective on leadership, specifically by exploring the moderating effect of follower mood on the leadership evaluations process based on performance information.Based on repeated translation between English and Chinese, total 129 employees and undergraduates were investigated with questionnaire items assigned. With the examination, it was indicated that Chinese questionnaire of general leadership evulations provided satisfactory reliability and validity.Furthermore, through the situation-simulation experimentation from Van Knippenberg and advanced statistical analysis techniques, not only the study explore the influence of performance information and follower mood on the process of leadership evaluations, but conduct empirical studies of theoretical models constructed.Eighty college-student participants from a certain college in Jiangxi were assigned randomly in the experiment of the first study, through a 2(team performance: success vs. failure)?2(mood: positive vs. negative) completely randomized between-subjects design; Ninety-six employee participants were sampled by random in the second study, through a 2(performance source: leader vs. team)?2(team performance: success vs. failure)?2(mood: positive vs. negative) completely randomized between-subjects design on Internet.In the effect tests of mood induction, the mood differences between subjects who watched different movie clips were significant. More specifically, the differences which subjects experienced positive and negative affect between who watched happy movie clips and who watched sad movie clips were significant.Multi-factor analyses of variance yielded a significant interactive effect between performance information and mood. Furthermore, simple effect tests revealed that the moderating effects of mood on the process which team, leader performance information influenced leadership perceptions.At last, the study conducted general discussions with research results, theoretical and practical contributions, limitations and future research prospects. Based on the content above, finally, the main conclusions were as follows:(1) The Chinese version of general leadership evulations questionnaire revised, which provided good reliability and validity, can treated as an effective tool to measure followers’ leadership perceptions.(2) The effect of team performance information on leadership perceptions within the followers’ negative mood condition is significantly stronger than the above effect within the positive mood condition.(3) The effect of explicit leader performance information on leadership perceptions within the followers’ negative mood condition is significantly stronger than the above effect within the positive mood condition.