A Diary Investigation of Daily Emotions, Emotional Display, and Leaders’ Authenticity in a Cohort of City Traffic Police

In this chapter (Chapter 2), Muhammad Ali Asadullah, Usman Abdullah, and Ahmad Siddiquei report on the findings of a daily diary study they conducted in the context of a Pakistani police department. In their research, the authors sought to investigate the effects of positive and negative emotion on three dimensions of emotional labor (surface-acting, deep-acting, and genuine emotions) and their subsequent impact on both leader and follower perceptions of authenticity. In this study, 69 police officers completed diary entries twice daily - at the beginning and end of their shifts - over two working days, where they reported their emotions (using the PANAS, Watson, Clark, & Tellegan, 1988) and emotional labor (using scales developed by Grandey, 2003, and Kruml & Geddes, 2000). Both the participants and their superior officers then rated their leadership authenticity (using the scale developed by Walumbwa, Avolio, Gardner, Wernsing, & Peterson, 2008). The results were that, while negative emotions were found to link to deep-acting and surface-acting to selfperceptions of authenticity, both deep-acting and genuine emotion were found to relate to self-perceptions of authenticity.