Winning the hearts and minds of followers: The interactive effects of followers’ emotional competencies and goal setting types on trust in leadership

Followers’ trust is essential for effective leadership. While initial approaches to trust focused on trust-related information, recent findings suggest that trust also has an affective component. Therefore, emotional competencies such as emotional attention, clarification and repair could predict trust in leadership, in early stages of the follower-leader relation. However, as this relation develops in time, trust-related judgments may shift from followers’ emotions towards leaders’ behaviors such as goal setting practices. As goals can be set in either a directive or participative way, followers with different levels of emotional competences should have distinct emotional responses towards these goal-setting types. On this rationale, we evaluated a possible interactive effect between goal setting types and emotional competencies on followers’ trust in leadership. For this, we conducted a two-wave experiment, randomly assigning 228 participants to two possible experimental conditions (directive vs. participative goal setting) or a control group (unspecific “Do your best” goals). We used multivariate regression analyses to test our hypotheses, controlling for demographic factors (participants age, biological gender and previous work experience) and stable personality traits. While there were no differences in trust in leadership across experimental conditions, followers’ emotional competencies at work session 1 had positive main effects on followers’ trust in leadership. At work session 2, significant interaction effects between directive goal setting type and both emotional clarity and repair indicate that only setting goals in a directive way will compensate low levels of followers’ emotional clarity and repair