Benefits of Leaders' Pleasurable Recovery Activities on Follower Performance via Emotional Contagion

Abstract

Recovery research has amply documented the benefits of employee recovery for their well-being and performance. However, most research to date has mainly focused on intraindividual benefits, so that we know relatively little about how focal employees' recovery activities might affect others at work. Bridging the gaps in the recovery and leadership literatures, this study focuses on leader-follower dyads and examines the interpersonal effects of leaders' recovery activities on followers' daily performance quality. In particular, our proposed model-which is informed by the conservation of resource and emotional contagion theories-explains the spillover-crossover process by which leaders' pleasurable recovery activity at home influences their positive affect (PA) displays at work, their followers' PA, and ultimately followers' task performance and creative behavior. We conducted two experience sampling method studies that relied on leader-member dyads of full-time working adults who responded to multiple online surveys for five workdays (n(1) = 511 daily observations) and 10 workdays (n(2) = 576 daily observations). In both studies, multilevel path analyses showed that leaders' previous-night pleasurable recovery activity leads to increased morning PA displays at work (observed by followers), which in turn crosses over to followers' midday PA and positive work outcomes. In particular, the affective crossover from leaders to followers was stronger when followers were in an inadequate morning recovery state and, therefore, more in need of resource replenishment.