Leader charisma and affective team climate: The moderating role of the leader’s influence and interaction

1990; González-Romá, Peiró, Subirats, & Mañas, 2000). This constitues what is called a «team affective climate» and has been related to important outcomes such as job satisfaction, commitment, and performance (e.g., Bartel & Saavedra, 2000; George, 1990). The emergence of affective climate as a team level construct is said to result from a number of processes and mechanisms, such as emotional contagion, emotional social comparison, and mood regulation norms (Bartel & Saavedra, 2000; Neumann & Strack, 2000). In addition, several studies have shown that team leaders play an important role in influencing individual emotions and modeling group affective climate (Bono & Illies, 2006; Erez, Misangyi, Johnson, LePine, & Halverson, 2008; Johnson, 2008; Sy, Cote, & Saavedra, 2005). Specifically, some studies have demonstrated the role of the leader’s emotions in team processes and outcomes (e.g., Lewis, 2000; Sy et al., 2005) and shown the importance of leadership styles and leaders’ characteristics (e.g., Bono & Illies, 2006; Pescosolido, 2002; Popper, 2004). One key characteristic of leaders, charisma, clearly influences work-team outcomes, such as satisfaction or performance (Bass, 1985; Bass, Avolio, Jung, & Berson, 2003; Cicero & Pierro, 2007). Charismatic leadership is said to be the result of an attribution based on followers’ perception of their leader’s behavior, specifically behaviors that articulate and help build a positive vision and foster an impression of the importance of the followers’ mission (Bass, 1985; Cicero & Pierro, 2007). Given this definition, we propose that charisma should also have important implications for team affective climate. At least four reasons can be provided to support this assertion: 1) charismatic leaders tend to be more engaging and emotionally expressive (Friedman & Riggio, 1981), 2) they tend to paint a positive, optimistic view of the future (Bass, 1985; Bono & Ilies, 2006), 3) they tend to attend, interpret, and integrate information in positive ways (Ashkanasy & Tse, 2000), and 4) they have a privileged position in the power hierarchy from which to transmit their positive views (Fredrickson, 2003). Despite these theoretical arguments and the empirical evidence supporting the importance of charismatic leadership in general, little is actually known about the role of charismatic leaders in creating positive and preventing negative team affective climate. The aim of the present study is to evaluate the impact of leaders’ charisma on two dimensions of team affective climate, team tension and team optimism and to examine the moderating role of leaders’ characteristics, such as influence and the frequency of interaction with the team, on this relationship.