Putting Leaders in a Bad Mood: The Affective Costs of Helping Followers With Personal Problems

Although leaders spend considerable time helping followers with personal problems, little research has investigated how such helping acts may impact leaders themselves. Drawing from affective events theory and the helping literature, we examine how responding to followers' help requests with personal problems influences leaders' own affect. As expected, we found that helping followers with personal problems was associated with an increase in leaders' negative affect. The strength of the association between personal helping and negative affect, however, depended on the day and on the leader. Specifically, personal helping increased negative affect less on days when leaders perceived their prosocial impact of personal helping to be high (vs. low). On the other hand, personal helping increased negative affect more on days when leaders also helped with task-related problems. Furthermore, at the between-person level, leaders with high (vs. low) managerial experience were less affected by personal helping. In exploratory analyses, we also investigated how followers reacted to leaders' helping. We found that whereas leader task-related helping was associated with follower perceptions of leader work engagement, leader personal helping was not. Additionally, helping with personal problems detracted from followers' increased perceptions of work engagement derived from leaders' task-related helping. Specifically, followers rated leaders who helped with task-related problems as more engaged on days when these leaders provided less (vs. more) personal helping. We discuss implications for research on helping and leadership.