Research: When Leaders Express Positivity Early On, Employees Perform Better

In the popular Apple TV+ show Ted Lasso, the titular character plays a relentlessly positive soccer coach whose care and kindness inspires his ragtag team to reach new heights. And, in fact, past academic research has largely supported the leadership style Lasso emulates, suggesting that leaders ought to be frequently positive to support their team members’ individual performance. Yet, any leader can tell you that this kind of blanket advice doesn’t always seem to track with what they see in the office: sometimes well-timed negative feedback can help drive performance and positivity can be more impactful in some moments than others.

In new research, recently published in Organization Science, we aimed to understand whether the timing of leaders’ positive or negative emotional expressions shapes team member performance differently. We indeed found that positivity can help drive performance—but the timing matters.

The Impact of Early Positivity

In our first study, we analyzed data on 9,968 consultants at a leading professional services firm over the course of 20 months. We collected the formal written feedback (approximately 250,000 comments) that they received from their leaders and we used software to see the degree to which leaders expressed positive and negative emotions in that feedback.

Examples of positive emotions in this context include comments like, said-employee “is a joy to work with” or “has been a pleasure to work with and I would love to have him on my team in the future.” Negative comments include language like “concern” and “disappointed,” as well as repeating words like “very” in phrases like they have a “very, very long way to go” that signal frustration from the feedback giver.

At this consultancy, the year is broken into three terms, early, middle, and late, and consultants may receive feedback when they finish any component of a project during any of these terms, giving us ample data throughout the teams’ lifecycles. We also tracked each individual consultant’s performance throughout the year, as indicated by formal performance reviews. These formal performance reviews asked leaders questions about each consultant’s performance and whether they would like to continue to work with this consultant. Leaders were also asked to provide input on whether the consultant deserved a raise and/or bonus.

We found that when leaders expressed a lot of early-term positivity, their employees performed better throughout the year, compared with all other leader expressions (for example those leaders who expressed more positivity at the mid-point, or end of year, or leaders who were primarily negative at the outset). This remained true even after controlling for factors like past performance or tenure in the firm.

To examine why early positive emotions played such a strong role in performance, we conducted a second study with 245 student-athletes and their 86 coaches on 20 N.C.A.A. Division 1 sports teams over the course of a season. We used multiple, time-lagged surveys to capture the degree to which team members received positive or negative emotional expressions from their coaching staffs over the course of the season and how it related to team members’ sense of worth and individual performance (as measured by coaching staff evaluations).

We found similar results: athletes whose coaches showed highly positive emotions during the preseason performed better than other athletes, even when controlling for things like playing time or previous performance. We found that this is because when leaders expressed positivity during the early time period, team members felt more highly respected and desired to maintain that respect throughout the year, thus motivating stronger performance.

While strong positive emotions at the beginning of a season or year were the best indicator of strong performance, we also found that in both studies, those individuals whose leaders showed strong positivity at the outset, then a little negativity at the midpoint, had the highest performance. This is likely because these individuals, sensing a dip in their leader’s evaluation of their contributions, were inspired to work even harder to regain their leaders’ early-term respect.

Recommendations for Leaders

Our research provides useful insights for leaders who hope to inspire their teams and unlock their employees’ potential.

1. Take advantage of early opportunities to express genuine positivity

Our research dispels the theory that showing harsh emotions at the start of a project drives performance (picture Bobby Knight). Instead, those leaders who hope to inspire strong performance should thoughtfully express how much they care about their staff, enjoy working with them, and value their specific contributions—and they should do this early.

Even the late Steve Jobs, who is notorious for embracing a more negative emotional leadership style, made sure to express enthusiasm to engineers during the kick-off meeting for the iPhone’s development process.

2. The best time for negative feedback might be the midpoint

Our research found, perhaps unsurprisingly, that leaders who express constant negativity hurt team members’ performance. However, our study also revealed that some mid-term negativity might just inspire your team to go the extra mile. Put simply, genuine tough love (that is, an abundance of love early on, sprinkled with a little toughness at the midpoint) works well as a performance-enhancer. Indeed, past research finds that when employees feel they received tough love, it increases their perceptions of their ability to grow and be promoted. Examples of leader tough love could include sharing feedback about areas for improvement even within a positive mid-year performance review or giving candid feedback about where a team member missed the mark in a recent work project.

To be clear, we are not recommending that leaders should be abusive or arbitrarily negative at the midpoint to drive success. For negative feedback to be meaningful and inspire positive change, it needs to be substantiated in a way that feels fair, proportional, and accurate so that it will encourage workers to want to improve. Everyone has space to grow—our study found that the midpoint just might be the best time to provide this constructive feedback.

Some Caveats

Our findings speak strongly to the timing effects of leaders’ emotional expressions during long-term projects, but less strongly to the timing effects during a meeting or shorter project. Despite this, other research powerfully argues that timing matters when it comes to other aspects of good leadership, like expressing gratitude. This suggests that timing is an important consideration for leaders looking to motivate their employees for projects of any length.

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A key aspect of leadership in a team or organization is a leader’s emotional leadership style. This involves expressing emotions towards their team members with the added burden that these expressions can have powerful impacts (intended and unintended) on recipients. Given this, it is important that leaders are thoughtful about their emotional leadership style and consider timing as a central dimension that shapes the effect of their emotional expressions. By effectively using more nuanced and timely emotional leadership styles, and considering both the timing and sequencing of emotional expressions over time, leaders can not only unlock performance potential, but also make team members feel a greater sense of worth and respect while performing at their best.