Multilevel Model of Emotional Stability on Emergent Group Leadership When Group Level Conflict Concerned

Emergent leaders within groups have been witness in leadership research after bulk of formal or established leader research. Without formal organizational authority or power, how emergent leadership influences group members under such situation? Emotional recovery and emotional threshold, the two dimensions of a new construct of emotional stability (Li, 2005), were used to predict emergent leadership under group level relationship and task conflict. Evolutionary theory about group was applied to develop the conceptual relationship between emotional traits and emergent leadership in this study. 230 employees working in 47 groups from 8 Chinese firms in Beijing were investigated in this research. The results of HLM (hierarchical linear modeling) found that the prediction of emotional threshold and emotional recovery on emergent group leadership increases with the increasing of group level task and relationship conflicts.