The ripple effect: uncovering the daily emotional pathways linking leadership practices to leaders’ willingness to help subordinates

While leadership practices are often assumed to be stable throughout the day, emerging evidence suggests that leaders’ willingness to help their followers fluctuates based on daily experiences, highlighting within-person variability that remains underexplored in leadership research. Drawing on Affective Events and Broaden-and-Build theories, we adopt a temporal dynamic and leader-centric perspective to examine these fluctuations. We propose that leaders’ engagement in three common practices, including task-oriented, relation-oriented and change-oriented behaviour, earlier in the workday positively influences their affect later in the day, which, in turn, increases their likelihood of offering help towards their subordinates the following day. To test our hypotheses, we employed an experience sampling methodology (ESM), collecting data from 120 full-time front-line supervisors twice a day over 2 consecutive workweeks, yielding 839 observations. Our findings reveal that these distinct daily leadership practices significantly shape fluctuations in leaders’ positive affect, thereby enhancing their subsequent willingness to help followers. In doing so, our study challenges the conventional view of leadership as a static phenomenon and offers new insights into how daily variations in leadership practices contribute to the work lives of followers.