Emotion Regulation and Its Implications for Leadership: An Integrative Review and Future Research Agenda

This integrative review synthesizes research on emotion regulation and its implications for leadership, from both leaders' and followers' perspectives. Regulating one's emotions is considered an area of key competence associated with effective and good leadership. Three themes emerged from the preliminary synthesis: (a) emotion regulation strategies as facilitators of health, (b) emotion regulation strategies as facilitators of job outcome, and (c) emotion regulation as barriers to health and job outcomes. Findings revealed that leaders' emotion competencies, cultural understanding, and coaching ability and the quality of leader-member relationships seem particularly important for the efficiency of emotion regulation. Methodological shortcomings and future research are discussed.