Implicit Leadership Theory Paper

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Challenging situations abound in leadership roles, and these situations can create emotionally demanding or stressful responses that may influence leaders and members alike (Siebert-Adzic, Soares, & Jacobs, 2012). Leaders who can leverage their strengths, attributes, or other characteristics may increase their chances of exceling when these events do occur (Arnold, Connelly, Walsh, Martin Ginis, & Ginis, 2015). One area of interest for coping with tense emotional situations is emotional intelligence, specifically the area concerning emotional regulation. When challenging or uncertain conditions are experienced by leaders, the ability to regulate and adjust emotional responses may allow them to be more effective in their role.
The concept of …show more content…

Implicit leadership theory is the concept that the way in which group members envision the traits or behaviors of what they consider to be an ideal leader, will impact how they will react to a leader (Schyns, Kiefer, Kerschreiter, & Tymon, 2011). This means that attributes such as resilience, self-awareness, or emotional regulation would be perceived subjectively by group members rather than through an objective leadership framework. Therefore, it is possible that the capacity for the characteristics and attributes of adaptability, regulation, resilience, and self-awareness to help leaders rise to the occasion would be tempered by followers’ perceptions about the applicability of the characteristics and attributes. In other words, if followers believed that emotional regulation was an attribute that a leader could use to overcome challenging situations, they would be more willing to follow a leader with those qualities. This in turn may allow a leader to more readily influence group members, thereby exhibiting greater direction and guidance over a challenging situation. This is the primary reason that group members will take part in the condition of emotional regulation training, along with …show more content…

Emotion regulation features prominently in this research proposal. How an individual interprets a situation may predict both the emotion and the intensity of the emotion displayed (Champe, Okech, & Rubel, 2013). Both emotion intensity and emotion type may contribute significantly to the ability to regulate emotion, and higher intensity emotions were found to be associated with greater emotion regulation efforts (Dixon-Gordon, Aldao, & De Los Reyes (2015). There has been some research into emotion regulation when dealing with difficult, challenging, or hard to control situations. Halperin and Pliskin (2015) found that emotions (e.g. intergroup emotions) contribute in shaping people’s attitudes and behavior in intractable situations. The question then becomes how to use this empirical knowledge for the purpose of developing steps to fully utilize emotion regulation in moments of conflict. Emotional competence is another offshoot of emotion regulation and refers to displaying and experiencing emotion that is appropriate for an organizational situation or environment (Voronov & Weber, 2016). Emotional competence can be thought of as having two facets; private, which is necessary for self-regulatory behavior, and public, which obtains approval from a recognized authority (Voronov & Weber, 2016). Private would allow leaders to actively engage in regulatory behaviors conducive to emotional responses, and public would help leaders and members alike in

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