Abstract:

Emotional leadership refers to a leadership style that the leaders use emotional contagion and strategies to manage members’ positive and negative emotion, create a suitable organization emotional climate and lead members to strive for common goals based on their own emotional competencies. At present, most studies use emotional intelligence scale to measure emotional leadership and lack a standardized measurement tool. The development of emotional leadership research is divided into three stages: leaders’ emotional competency focused research, emotional contagion focused research, and emotional leadership focused research. Based on the research contents, we propose a multi-level integration model. Gene, personality and emotional trait can predict emotional leadership. Right frontal lobe and emotional leadership are reciprocal causation. Emotional leadership has a significant positive influence on leadership effectiveness at both organizational level and individual level through direct or indirect routes. Conceptualization, measurement, moderators, biology basis, multi-level study and cross-cultural comparison should get more attention in the future researches.

Key words: emotional leadership, emotion management, emotional competence, emotional contagion