In the corporate world, leaders are frequently encouraged to adopt the “Ted Lasso” approach when engaging with their employees. Ted Lasso, the fictional football coach from the popular Apple TV+ series, remains unwaveringly positive regardless of the circumstances. His style is not merely about being genial or superficially boosting morale. Extensive research spanning several decades has demonstrated that maintaining a positive outlook can enhance the individual performance of team members. This discovery has led many organisations to invest in emotional intelligence training for their managerial staff.

However, new findings from a research team in Texas suggest that incorporating a measured amount of negativity leads to even greater achievements. Crucially, it is not simply the presence of negativity that matters but the timing of its expression and the emotional groundwork laid earlier by the leader. As Constantinos Coutifaris, an assistant professor of management, explains, “When — and which — emotions are expressed by leaders matters for unlocking the potential of team members.”

Working alongside co-author Paul Green, also an assistant professor of management, Coutifaris explored how emotional expressions from leaders influence employee performance over time. While the prevailing wisdom confirms that positive emotions are beneficial, Coutifaris and Green observed that much of the previous research overlooked the importance of timing. Together with Jacob Levitt and the late Sigal Barsade of The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, they conducted two major studies examining how the sequencing of positive and negative emotions influenced performance outcomes.

The first study focused on student-athletes and their coaches at an NCAA Division I sports programme, while the second analysed employees and their managers at a leading consulting firm. Both studies divided the timeline — a sports season and a corporate calendar year, respectively — into three distinct phases: beginning, middle, and end. The researchers discovered that early positive emotions expressed by leaders significantly improved individual performance. Yet, intriguingly, performance improved even more when leaders introduced occasional expressions of negativity during the middle phase.

In the athletic study, 245 varsity athletes assessed the emotional expressions of 86 coaches across a season, rating the frequency of positive and negative emotions on a scale from 1 to 5. In turn, coaches rated each athlete’s performance. The data revealed that a one-point increase in early positive expressions resulted in a 3.3% boost in performance. However, if coaches exhibited above-average negative emotions midway through the season, that increase in early positivity led to a 4.4% improvement — a substantial 33.3% amplification of the effect. In the corporate study, computational linguistics software analysed 9,968 employee reviews, measuring the proportion of positive and negative words used by managers across the year. Again, results showed that introducing occasional negativity during the middle phase enhanced the benefit of initial positivity by a striking 40.8%.

Notably, the balance remained firmly in favour of positivity. In the business study, the median percentage of positive words in early evaluations stood at 5.5%, whereas the median rate of negative words at the midpoint was only 0.5%. In other words, praise continued to outweigh criticism vastly. Nevertheless, the small injection of negativity proved decisive. As Green notes, “The big surprise for me was that negative emotions are pretty valuable. They help people improve.”

The researchers attribute these findings to the psychological phenomenon known as imprinting theory, which holds that early emotional experiences leave a lasting mark on subsequent attitudes and behaviours. In the context of leadership, initial expressions of positivity establish a secure emotional foundation. Subordinates interpret these early signals as indicators of their social worth and respect within the team. Thus, when a leader later introduces critical feedback, it is not perceived as an affront or a withdrawal of respect but rather as a constructive nudge to improve and reaffirm their valued status.

Coutifaris summarises the key practical takeaway: leaders should strive to create a favourable emotional climate at the outset, during the formative stages of a team’s development. Once a sense of belonging and value is securely imprinted, they can judiciously introduce negative feedback midway through the team’s journey to stimulate growth and improvement. “Expressing those positive emotions early allows you, the leader, to use some different emotions at the midpoint to sort of jolt people to perform better and better over time,” he explains. In short, the art of leadership may lie not simply in being positive or critical but in mastering the delicate timing and balance between the two.

More information: Constantinos Coutifaris et al, Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance, Organization Science. DOI: 10.1287/orsc.2023.17390

Journal information: Organization Science Provided by University of Texas at Austin