Cognitive asymmetry in employee emotional reactions to leadership behaviors B Marie T. Dasborough * University of Queensland, Business School, St. Lucia, QLD, 4072, Australia Abstract This article is predicated on the idea that leaders shape workplace affective events. Based on Affective Events Theory (AET), I argue that leaders are sources of employee positive and negative emotions at work. Certain leader behaviors displayed during interactions with their employees are the sources of these affective events. The second theoretical underpinning of the article is the Asymmetry Effect of emotion. Consistent with this theory, employees are more likely to recall negative incidents than positive incidents. In a qualitative study, evidence that these processes exist in the workplace was found. Leader behaviors were sources of positive or negative emotional responses in employees; employees recalled more negative incidents than positive incidents, and they recalled them more intensely and in more detail than positive incidents. Consequently, leaders may need to exercise their emotional intelligence to generate emotional uplifts to overcome the hassles in the workplace that employees seem to remember so vividly. D 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Leadership; Affective events; Asymmetry; Emotions bI’ve been doing my job for a long time and I put in my regular report where I’m going and for my manager to come back and say, bno I don’t want you to go thereQ, bothers me. I travel a lot in my job, so I’ll ask my boss: why? In one case, my boss simply said, bI didn’t want you to goQ, and I was frustrated with that. I never found out why he didn’t want to go there. It’s pure frustration, not knowing why. I’m the most experienced in that area; I know what has to be done. All my boss had to do was give a reason...I don’t mind if someone gives me a reason, but it’s frustrating when I’m never given one.Q Employee talking about a recent interaction with his manager (face to face organizational leader). In the opening quotation, the employee expresses negative emotions about his boss’s lack of communication at work. This quotation, extracted from one of the interviews conducted in the present study, serves to illustrate the reactions that negative encounters can generate in the workplace. In this article, therefore, the findings of a qualitative study of subordinate perceptions of leaders during face-to-face interactions in the workplace and how they respond emotionally to particular leadership behaviors are presented. The study represents an exploration of a model based on 1048-9843/$ - see front matter D 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.leaqua.2005.12.004 B This paper is the 2003 Kenneth E. Clark Student Research Award Winner, sponsored by the Center for Creative Leadership. * Present address: William S. Spears School of Business, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK, USA. Tel.: +1 405 744 5118; fax: +1 405 744 5180. E-mail address: m.dasborough@okstate.edu. The Leadership Quarterly 17 (2006) 163 – 178