The price of wearing (or not wearing) the crown: The effects of loneliness on leaders and followers

Status differentials and social distance between leaders and followers

The quantity and quality of actual social relationships may be influenced by a leader’s social distance from subordinates, which is referred to as “perceived differences in status, rank, authority, social standing, and power” and has been argued to “affect the degree of intimacy and social contact that develop between followers and their leader” (Antonakis and Atwater, 2002: 682). Given that followers who experience more frequent interactions with their leader are likely to have closer relationships, it is not surprising that the concept of social distance between leaders and their followers has been at the center of many leadership theories (see Bligh and Riggio, 2012). Some research suggests that leader distance can be beneficial to an organization’s culture by reducing “micromanagement” issues and other interpersonal problems (Howell et al., 2005). However, most of the literature points to leader distance creating negative outcomes, including poor relationship development and follower perceptions of leaders as uninvolved or less engaged (Anderson and Brown, 2010).

Meta-analytic results suggest leaders who accentuate their status differences in their interactions with followers do not tend to develop high-quality relationships in their organizations (Dulebohn et al., 2011). Status has been defined as the respect, prestige, and prominence ascribed to an individual by group members (Anderson and Kilduff, 2009). Status is bestowed from an external source (Blau, 1964) and is based on the evaluation of others by way of status-conferral processes (Blader and Chen, 2012).

Compounding the social distance between followers and leaders, followers are likely, at an unconscious or even conscious level, to resent the machinations of (e.g. transformational) leaders to create a vision and compel followers to adhere to it (Amernic et al., 2007) as a salient manifestation of accentuated power inequities in organizations (Collinson, 2017). Yet, it is also possible that followers that respond positively to one of the four cardinal behaviors of transformational leaders—idealized influence—may develop even stronger feelings of admiration and affinity toward such leaders (Colbert et al., 2008). This exception notwithstanding, individuals who practice transformational or authentic leadership might be particularly susceptible to excommunication from in-group members. The consequent lack of connections between leaders and followers could produce loneliness in both groups and is explored further in proposition 4.

Status differentials between leaders and followers tend to stimulate intergroup dynamics in which out-group members (in this case, the leader) become depersonalized by in-group members (e.g. subordinates) (Tajfel and Turner, 1979). Once leaders begin to become outcasts due to their higher status, they may express more high-arousal negative emotions such as anger, which confer higher status in the eyes of followers, and less low-arousal negative emotions, such as sadness, that reduce their status (Tiedens, 2001). Such a leadership trajectory has been attributed to numerous organizational leaders, such as Lee Iacocca, the former CEO of Chrysler (Spector, 2014).

While such emotion expression may be conducive to status protection, the same cannot be declared in relation to the development of high-quality relationships with followers (Kark, 2012). A good example is Steve Jobs, the former CEO of Apple, who was widely attributed with high status and poor leader–follower relationships due to his unpredictable display of anger and other high-arousal negative emotions, including frequent expressions of “extreme emotionalism … petulance and impatience” that often led to employees feeling humiliated (Isaacson, 2012: 93). In general, these power-induced status differentiators within organizations are also likely to compound leader social isolation and loneliness.

Proposition 2: Status differences are likely to produce higher social distance between leaders and followers and, consequently, increased leader and follower loneliness.

The empathy problem

Over the long term, as individuals rise to positions of high status, they tend to become excommunicated by followers into an “out-group” due to their status differential with followers. This temporal process is ironic, as leaders are often selected or elected due to their prototypicality in representing the values and characteristics of the group. Once leaders assume their roles, however, they tend to become fixated upon by followers that they begin to aggrandize themselves and become less attentive and empathetic to the needs of followers (Hogg and Terry, 2000).

In fact, individuals in high-ranking positions tend to be less polite, more likely to speak out of turn and interrupt others, and more socially inappropriate, which has been attributed to lower empathy for others. For example, in an experimental study, three-person teams were tasked with writing a document together. One of the individuals in each group was assigned the role of evaluation, accentuating their status within the group. When cookies were provided to each group, the higher-status group member was more likely to eat with their mouth open, to consume a second cookie, and to allow crumbs to fall out of their mouth (Keltner et al., 2003). Conferring power on an individual can also cause them to become less accurate in perspective taking (the cognitive form of empathy) and more likely to permit stereotypes to guide their judgments of others (Ebenbach and Keltner, 1998). In general, high-status individuals tend to pay less attention to others (Keltner et al., 2003). The reduction in leader empathy as the leader shifts to the out-group is problematic, as the ability to provide interpersonal support to others is a basic dimension of effective leadership (Avolio et al., 2009).

The decrease in leader empathy as the leader moves to the out-group creates a notable imbalance in perspective taking. In such a situation, followers tend to do the opposite—devote more attentional resources to information seeking about the dispositional characteristics and personal idiosyncrasies of leaders—because they perceive this information to be predictive of a leader’s future behavior (Hogg and Terry, 2000). Hence leaders, by the nature of their organizational role, often sit outside the informal friendship network, which by its very nature excommunicates them to the out-group through social identification processes (Hogg and Terry, 2000). Being in the out-group, even if only in one’s imagination, can be a marginalizing and ostracizing experience that can create feelings of loneliness (Gonsalkorale and Williams, 2007).

Yet, leaders are not the only culprits in creating the empathy problem. Personal communication, it turns out, is often not reciprocated in situations when the parties have unequal status. There tends to be more willingness to self-disclose up (i.e. from subordinate to boss) than down the status hierarchy (Earle et al., 1983). Perhaps, for this reason, survey research suggests that managers’ empathy toward non-managers (which requires self-disclosure by non-managers) tends to go unreciprocated (Toegel et al., 2013). The reason is that while leaders deem their expressions of empathy toward their followers as “extra-role behavior,” followers can hold a contrary view. Toegel et al.’s (2013) study suggests that followers consider leader empathy to be “in-role behavior” that leaders enact for strategic reasons, which hence does not merit reciprocation. Moreover, other research (Ames et al., 2004) suggests that when the recipients of leader empathy deem the empathy to have been provided by the leader for instrumental reasons (e.g. to increase the leader’s understanding of a follower in order to optimize the follower’s future performance), this leader empathy is less likely to be generative of a high-quality leader–follower relationship. Hence, it seems that while followers are finely attuned to social information emanating from the leader in order to predict the leader’s future behavior—understandably, as this behavior can promote or threaten their future livelihood—this information seeking does not translate into the interpersonal expressions of empathy that might attenuate leader loneliness.

Individual perceptions of a lack of empathy from others in the social environment in which they are embedded tend to result in an increase in ostracism (Gonsalkorale and Williams, 2007) and loneliness (Konrath et al., 2011). Hence, leaders that express empathy and listen to the personal and professional challenges of followers (perhaps in the hopes of developing a caring relationship and receiving empathy from followers in return), but do not experience this follower empathy, are likely to experience an increase in loneliness. Followers who trust and confide in early-stage leaders who subsequently become less empathetic and attuned to their own needs as those leaders rise up through the organizational hierarchy (Hogg and Terry, 2000) similarly are likely to experience an increase in loneliness.

This bidirectional empathy challenge is likely to be even more pronounced today than a few decades ago, as rates of both cognitive and affective empathy in the general population have decreased by approximately 40% (Konrath et al., 2011). This diminished experience of empathy, which has been construed as a coveted emotional “commodity” (Hochschild, 1983), may be a contributing factor to why many leaders and followers alike find themselves feeling increasingly lonely in their organizations.

Proposition 3: Leaders and followers who experience low levels of empathy from each other are more likely to experience high levels of loneliness.

Transactional leadership

The status-induced disregard for the humanness of organizational members, conceptualized over a century ago by Taylor’s (1911) treatise on how leaders often treat followers as inputs, was later propagated in theories of transactional leadership that exhort leaders to emphasize extrinsic incentives to spur employee contribution (Bass and Avolio, 2003). Transactional leadership theory underscores a diminished emphasis on leader traits and the enhanced significance of (both implicit and explicit) contractual relationships.

This framework, also conceptualized as a cost-benefit exchange process between leader and follower, has been constructed on the assumption that if the job or work environment is not motivating or satisfying enough, the leader will maintain loyalty by compensating the employee for the deficiencies (Den Hartog et al., 1997). Feasibly, the lack of motivation and job satisfaction associated with some transactional leadership climates along with a disregard for the intrinsic motivations of organizational actors may lead to reduced meaningfulness. Consequently, this situation could also result in increased loneliness in both leaders and followers, as leader–follower relationship quality is often constructed through a shared motivation around common values and goals (Chen et al., 2016).

Empirical and theoretical research supports the notion that leaders who adopt a transactional approach are unlikely to develop high-quality relationships with followers (for a review, see Tse et al., 2015). Van Knippenberg and Sitkin (2013) challenge this view, arguing that transactional leadership has been unfairly presented as “the dull, mechanical, carrots-and-sticks leadership that would be more ordinary and customary—a background against which charismatic-transformational leadership shines all the more brightly” and is therefore “a biased subset of leadership” (p. 12). According to Van Knippenberg and Sitkin (2013), transactional leadership has been set up by transformational leadership theorists as the unwitting counterfoil to transformational leadership that has become synonymous with extrinsic motivation, implying that intrinsic motivation is only captured by transformational leadership. Yet, followers of transformational leaders may not be permitted a sufficient sense of agency and individual choice (Amernic et al., 2007; Tourish, 2013) to experience the fulfillment of their intrinsic motivations. Additionally, research on the dyadic relational schema between leaders and followers suggests that high levels of congruent expressive relational schema (willingness to mutually engage in affective and extra-role social exchanges) generate high levels of leader–member exchange behaviors (Tsai et al., 2017).

An important question that remains, then, is whether the more recent relationship-oriented theories of leadership (for a review, see Avolio et al., 2009) such as transformational leadership (Colbert et al., 2008) and authentic leadership (Gardneret al., 2005)—might lead to reduced levels of leader and follower loneliness. It is to this question that we now turn.

Transformational leadership

This relationship-oriented leadership style has been widely considered the most effective form of leadership (Shamir et al., 1993). Transformational leaders are attributed with imbuing followers with respect, trust, and pride (Menges et al., 2011) and generally with enacting “leader behaviors that transform and inspire followers to perform beyond expectations while transcending self-interest for the good of the organization” (Avolio et al., 2009: 423).

Transformational leaders have been fashioned as individuals who alter the goals of followers such that their reengineered aspirations stem from higher-order values and are representative of the shared priorities of leaders and followers (Bono and Judge, 2004). Critical perspectives on leadership, however, take another view: in most cases, transformational leaders bear a disproportionate influence on these goals while lower-status followers feel pressured to conform to the newly elaborated organizational norms, resulting in a lack of dissent (Tourish and Pinnington, 2002). For example, in the case of Jack Welch, the former CEO of General Electric, “the highly directive communications of Welch were intended to enforce the internationalization of values and behaviors he deemed appropriate” (Amernic et al., 2007: 1862).

Mainstream theories of transformational leadership adopt a unitarist approach where leaders declare a vision and followers happily fall in line through social information processes in which information communicated by the leader purportedly influences followers’ attitudes and behaviors (Ou et al., 2014). However, critical perspectives on leadership allow for the possibility of multiple purviews and disparate experiences of leaders and followers (Tourish, 2013). These perspectives also note the proclivity of transformational leadership theorists to depict these larger-than-life leaders as heroic individuals with a claim to moral superiority that compels followers to gleefully succumb to their directives (Spector, 2014; Tourish, 2013), a claim corroborated by in-depth analysis of specific leaders (e.g. Lee Iacocca (Spector, 2014) and Jack Welch (Amernic et al., 2007)).

Through this mechanism of heightened conformity and reduced dissent instilled by a powerful leader engaged in unidirectional interactions with their followers (Amernic et al., 2007; Tourish, 2013), those followers may experience poor relationship quality and the inability to generate or maintain satisfying relationships. These relational conditions could explain reports of loneliness due to the follower’s deeper value incongruence with organizational norms over which they have little influence. Additionally, followers may not experience authentic self-emergence in an organizational culture characterized by a “uniform definition of reality” exacted by the leader (Amernic et al., 2007: 1863). In fact, followers of highly assertive leaders often find it difficult to speak up about what they most value (Grant et al., 2011).

Given the uneven power dynamics in organizations (Anderson and Brown, 2010) in which followers are disproportionately influenced by leaders as they more finely attune to leader motivations and idiosyncratic behaviors than vice-versa (Keltner et al., 2003), a “transformational leader” will often step in and compound these inequities. Such leader behaviors render it more difficult for followers to develop a distinct identity separate from the organization. Without a strong personal identity, followers are likely to find it more challenging to identify their values and develop a unique sense of self, a precondition for experiencing value congruence with others.

This predicament of followers is critical, as value incongruence with those around them and not feeling understood by others were both cited as primary causes of the “loneliness epidemic” in the recent Cigna (2018) loneliness survey. Because leadership style influences how the leader models and values relationships in the organization, it follows that both transactional and transformational leaders may be generative of both leader and follower loneliness. However, this loneliness manifests in different ways: transactional leaders through the devaluation of interpersonal relationships and transformational leadership through the insistence of their subjective version of the values and norms through which followers must be transformed. In both cases, the resultant diminished leader–follower relationships are likely, in turn, to be a contributing factor of reported leader loneliness.

Transformational leaders that compel their followers to adhere to a singular, unitarist interpretation of an organizational culture can create a context ripe for both leader and follower loneliness. (It must be noted that any authoritarian leader with a unitarist interpretation of the organization’s culture, independent of whether they are transformational, is likely to create the conditions in which both leader and follower loneliness thrive.) In the case of leaders, the insistence of the transformational leader in unilaterally producing a vision and influencing others to accept it is likely to accentuate the leader’s status, which will in turn increase the distance of the leader in their relationship with the followers. The surface acting the leader enacts to live up to this idealized image as they assume their role each day is likely to alienate them from both themselves and their followers (Grandey, 2000) and increase leader loneliness.

In parallel, followers are likely to feel obliged to surface act to conform to the restrictive norms imposed by the transformational leader that they are unable to influence. Surface acting occurs when organizational members alter outward appearances to conform to emotion display rules (Grandey, 2000). Surface acting is generally considered an unhealthy form of emotional labor (for a review, see Humphrey et al., 2015) as it leads to self- and other-alienation (Grandey, 2000; Humphrey, 2012), which could, in part, explain the loneliness in such leaders.

It is important to note that our claims are not unidirectional: each leadership theory may also possess an intrinsic mechanism that might buffer against leader and follower loneliness. A benefit of transactional leadership, for instance, is that it acknowledges and respects the independent goals of leader and followers, enabling followers to express their independence of personal identity and vision rather than conforming to the leader’s dictates (Tourish and Pinnington, 2002). Followers who preserve their self-identity are less likely to experience the disconnection from self often associated with loneliness (Cacioppo and Patrick, 2008). Hence, the intactness of personal identity associated with transactional leadership may diminish some of the previously documented effects of transactional leadership on follower—and, in turn, leader—loneliness.

Proposition 4a: “Transformational” leaders are likely to induce higher loneliness among followers than “non-transformational” leaders.

Authentic leadership

Authenticity has been traditionally conceptualized as integrity of self and behavior within and across situations (Baumeister, 1998) or acting as one’s “true” or “real” self (Rogers, 1961). In the domain of organizational leadership, authentic leadership has built on this association of authenticity with the internally defined self (Gardner et al., 2005) and defined authentic leadership as “a pattern of transparent and ethical leader behavior that encourages openness in sharing information needed to make decisions while accepting follower inputs” (Avolio et al., 2009: 424). Authentic leadership, according to its adherents, emphasizes high ethical standards, self-awareness, and the adoption of characteristics related to one’s “true” self (Gardner et al., 2005).

Critical perspectives on authentic leadership, on the other hand, hold that authentic leaders subordinate their deeper inclinations to a collectively-, organizationally defined self, resulting in their losing the very authenticity they pride themselves on (Ford and Harding, 2011; Ladkin et al., 2016; Lawler and Ashman, 2012). In fact, the only attributed characteristics of authentic leaders are related to the positive subdimension of one’s genuine self, such as optimism, confidence, hopefulness, and resilience (Gardner et al., 2005). Gardner et al. (2005), for example, describe “the positive psychological states and positive moral perspective that both contribute to and are enhanced by authentic leadership” (p. 345). Similarly, Luthans and Avolio (2003) define authentic leadership in organizations as

a process that draws from both positive psychological capacities and a highly developed organizational context, which results in both greater self-awareness and self-regulated positive behaviors on the part of leaders and associates, fostering positive self-development. (p. 243)

The danger of this oversight is that the suppression of an individual’s true drives and motives—often embedded in the negative emotions they express (Gibson and Tulgan, 2002; Silard, 2018)—is likely to lead to self-alienation (Grandey, 2000; Humphrey, 2012). Given the isolating effects of self-presentation (Hochschild, 1983), this regulation of all negative emotions could be a contributing factor in reported loneliness. The reason is that authentic leadership, at least as it has been fashioned in the mainstream literature (e.g. Gardner et al., 2005), impels leaders to subordinate the parts of themselves that contravene the organizationally sanctioned cultural norms, which is likely to induce disconnection from self, reduced self-disclosure in relationships, and, hence, loneliness.

These critical perspectives on authentic leadership have refashioned the construct from its origins as an internal search for one’s “true self” (Gardner et al., 2005) to a multidimensional, externally oriented process of distilling fragmented identities into a coherent narrative (Ibarra and Barbulescu, 2010). Hence, there appears to be a darker side of authentic leadership (Nyberg and Sveningsson, 2014) that encompasses Jung’s “shadow self” (Ladkin et al., 2016) in addition to the more social acceptable characteristics of earlier, more singularly positive constructions of authentic leadership. Leaders who incorporate their unconscious motives into their leadership style are more likely to experience meaning in their roles, which is particularly critical for leaders to remain engaged in their work (Lips-Wiersma et al., 2016). This experience of psychological meaningfulness is likely to lead to more substantive workplace relationships and, hence, reduce the leader’s likelihood of feeling disconnected and lonely.

When individuals experience a crisis of meaning, on the other hand, they also tend to experience stress and anxiety and to psychologically, socially, and/or physically withdraw (e.g. Baumeister, 2005). This insular, inhibitive quality impedes the development of high-quality relationships where mutual intrinsic value is required. The retreating process involved serves to protect individuals from the pain they experience in their environment. On retreating, such individuals invariably discover that without meaningful human connection, there is only emptiness and a sense of ultimate loneliness (Mijuskovic, 2015). However, in order to regain a sense of meaning and build relational wealth (Leana and Rousseau, 2000), they need to trust others and feel care and empathy for and from others.

Lonely individuals tend to be more self-focused and non-responsive toward other’s needs (Perlman and Peplau, 1981). Research also suggests that lonely people make more self-statements, ask fewer questions of their partners, and change the topic more frequently (Pickett et al., 2004). The irony is that lonely people monitor social cues more closely as they desire social connection, called the “reaffiliation motive,” yet also emerge in relationships with increased hostility, exploitation of other people, low empathy toward others, and anxiety.

According to Ford and Harding (2011), conventional authentic leadership theory assumes that the “authentic leader” internalizes the organization’s values and then influences followers to embody the same values. Due to their higher level of power, such leaders may compel followers to become unable to distinguish clear boundaries between self and organization. As Ford and Harding (2011: 473) argue: “The follower … is an object to the subject of the leader. The follower is denied subjectivity, is not allowed to be an I.” The consequent identity loss of followers at the insistence of the “authentic” leader, who treats followers as mere objects in the attainment of the leader’s interpretation of value propagation writ large, is likely to cause followers to “suffer a psychic death” (Ford and Harding, 2011: 474) and may experience loneliness.

Leaders may fare no better from the enhancement of power inequities that these seemingly innocuous relationship-oriented leadership theories enable (Collinson, 2017). As Ford and Harding (2011: 474) suggest,

The outcome for the leader could be dire: those whose followers are but a reflection of the self is one who either may be plunged into ‘unbearable aloneness’ or who escapes into merger with like-self beings … where anyone who is different is not recognized.

While the philosophers, Heidegger and Sartre, did not agree on much, they were in agreement that each individual experiences existential angst in their attempt to realize who they truly are vis-à-vis the constraints of their family, culture, and society (Lawler and Ashman, 2012). Sartre deems this tension between being the person one desires to be and the person who is influenced by their specific life context, situation, or “being-in-the-world” to be at the center of the existential dichotomy that defines the self (Lawler and Ashman, 2012). In line with a client-centered clinical psychological approach, most critical perspectives on leadership view the self not as a fixed entity, but as existing in a continual process of “becoming” (Rogers, 1961). At the center of this dichotomy, our sense of authenticity is “to realize fully one’s being-in-situation, whatever this situation may happen to be” (Sartre, 1999: 54). The psychoanalytic perspective of Jung (Ladkin et al., 2016) reinforces the philosophical assertions of Sartre and Heidegger that individuation requires a collective context for its development, and the self does not flourish in isolation.

This perspective on the “becoming” of the authentic self is in stark contradiction to traditional authentic leadership theory. An existential crisis that produces leader loneliness seems almost inevitable when leaders only allow themselves to engage in positive, prosocial behaviors (Nyberg and Sveningsson, 2014) that deny the multi-faceted, inherently contradictory nature of the self (Ladkin et al., 2016). In fact, studies on leaders who deny wholesale the expression of negative emotions that may be aligned with their “shadow self” in a Jungian sense (Ladkin et al., 2016) suggest that these positive-emotion performances can result in stress, burnout, and alienation from self and others (Grandey, 2000; Humphrey, 2012), which, as per our above arguments, could generate loneliness. Perhaps, for this reason, leadership has been referred to as an “alienating social myth” (Gemmill and Oakley, 1992: 113).

“Authentic” leaders who refuse to display negative emotions not only inhibit part of their authenticity, but ignore the socio-functional purpose of leader negative emotions (Parrott, 2002; Silard, 2018). Whereas positive emotions can induce a broadened attention span germane to creativity, feelings of contentment, and a reduction of “autonomic reactivity” in followers (Fredrickson and Branigan, 2005), the events linked to negative emotions are more vividly recalled and easily accessed (Amabile et al., 2004).

Leader negative emotions are also important for effective leadership, as when they are self-directed (e.g. sadness, anxiety, frustration, disappointment), such emotions signal to followers that a work outcome is highly valued by the leader (Gibson and Tulgan, 2002) and follower performance needs to be improved (Fitness, 2000). The expression of negative, self-focused emotions also enables the leader to express their vulnerability and provide followers with a gateway to connect with them (Cropanzano et al., 2017) without leading to follower stress and burnout of follower-directed negative emotions such as anger, ridicule, contempt, and rage. However, this “other side” of the authentic self is ignored by conventional authentic leadership theory (Ford and Harding, 2011; Nyberg and Sveningsson, 2014). The discovery of negative self-focused emotions that are favorable to express in a leadership context could be an interesting new stream of research that would embolden critical perspectives on authentic leadership (Ford and Harding, 2011; Ladkin and Taylor, 2010). Such a research agenda would also broaden the repertoire of sanctioned leader emotion display beyond solely positive emotions such as enthusiasm, optimism, and hope.

The creation and maintenance of high-quality relationships necessitates trust, openness, and reciprocity beyond exchange value, therefore creating authenticity in dyadic relationships (Ferris et al., 2009). The mainstream definition of authentic leadership suggests that, in the long term, authentic leaders will develop more meaningful relationships (Gardner et al., 2005) and potentially keep loneliness at bay. Yet, contradicting such theorizing, leaders who are willing to be critically self-reflective (which entails opening up about a broader range of personal motives and qualities than the limited positive orientations sanctioned in the authentic leadership literature allows) have been found to be more likely to build trust with their followers (Dolbier et al., 2001).

Similarly, transformational leaders may face challenges in developing a high level of trust with followers due to their intolerance for dissent (Tourish and Pinnington, 2002). Lee Iacocca, for instance, has been over-attributed as single-handedly stewarding Chrysler’s turnaround and acting as a transformational leader despite flagrant abuses of trust and confidence with followers (Spector, 2014). ² Consequently, followers of transformational leaders can be directly proscribed from expressing a significant proportion of their identity by leaders intent on transforming them as per the leaders’ subjective interpretation of the organizational values and culture (Tourish, 2013). Whereas, with authentic leadership, leaders might negate a significant proportion of their identity (the “shadow self”) (Ladkin et al., 2016). The existential crisis associated with such leader behaviors, as we argue above, could produce loneliness. This leader loneliness is then likely to generate follower loneliness, because if followers are interacting with a leader who is only sharing one dimension of who they are, these followers are likely to similarly feel that their holistic self is undetected, unwanted, and superfluous to the organization. Followers may also find it difficult to connect with and identify with the leader, resulting in a toxic amalgam of feelings including disconnection from others (including the leader) and a lack of inclusion and meaningful relationships, all of which can produce loneliness.

Proposition 5a: “Authentic” leaders (as defined by mainstream authentic leadership theory) are likely to only be authentic in the expression of positive emotions and to abstain from the authentic expression of negative emotions.