关键词: 非正式领导地位变化, 同事情绪, 情绪认知评价理论, 同事交换关系

Abstract: Informal leaders, as the "critical few" in organizations, serve as a core pillar of team effectiveness. Unlike formal leaders with legitimate authority, the status of informal leaders is inherently dynamic. Despite the growing body of research on informal leadership, the extant literature still has two notable limitations. First, most studies have focused on the antecedents of informal leadership emergence, with insufficient attention paid to the evolutionary process of informal leadership status (e.g., enhancement, weakening, or even disappearance). The limited research that has examined the dynamics of informal leadership status has only explored its positive evolutionary path, while neglecting the potential negative evolutionary trajectory. Second, current research has predominantly adopted the focal informal leader’s perspective, devoting insufficient attention to the behaviors of coworkers as the "grantors" of informal leadership status. The few studies that have considered coworker behaviors have only explored their positive responses to informal leadership status, ignoring the potential erosive effects of coworkers. In this sense, research confined to the positive (granting) perspective provides only a partial understanding, failing to fully reveal the role and mechanism of coworker behaviors in the evolution of informal leadership status. To address these research gaps and comprehensively depict the dynamic evolution of informal leadership status, this study draws on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion and adopts a dynamic research perspective to explore the dual-path mechanism through which coworker emotions and behaviors exert endowment and erosion effects on the evolution of informal leadership status. It further examines the key contingency factor that determines coworkers’ positive or negative responses to informal leadership status. A four-wave longitudinal study with repeated measurements and multi-source data was conducted to test the proposed theoretical model (N=311). The empirical results fully supported the proposed theoretical model. The findings of the latent change score model indicated that coworker exchange relationship plays a critical moderating role in the dual-path evolution of informal leadership status. Specifically, when the level of coworker exchange relationship is high, the initial level of informal leadership status is more likely to trigger an increase in coworkers’ inspiration emotions and subsequent helping behaviors, which in turn drives the further enhancement of informal leadership status in subsequent stages. In contrast, when the level of coworker exchange relationship is low, the initial informal leadership status tends to induce a rise in coworkers’ envy emotions and subsequent social undermining behaviors, ultimately leading to the erosion of informal leadership status in the following stages. This study contributes to the literature on informal leadership in several ways. First, by constructing a dual-path model that elucidates how colleague emotions and behaviors shape the evolution of informal leadership status, this study highlights the critical role of colleagues in the dynamic evolution of informal leadership status, expanding the research perspective from the individual level to the social interaction level. Second, this study complements the understanding of coworker influences in the dynamics of informal leadership status by identifying the negative responses (i.e., envy and social undermining) of coworkers, thereby revealing the dark-side process in the dynamics of informal leadership. Third, this study introduces the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion into the dynamics of informal leadership status, revealing the mediating role of changes in coworker emotions in driving changes in coworker behaviors. Fourth, this study empirically verifies that coworker exchange relationship serves as a key boundary condition in the dual-path evolution of informal leadership status. This finding enriches the boundary condition on the dynamic evolution of informal leadership status and advances the theoretical understanding of how informal leadership status is maintained and developed in organizations.

Key words: Informal leadership status change, Coworker emotions, Cognitive appraisal theory of emotion, Coworker exchange