04/28/2025

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

The emotional tenor of a leader’s expressions can have a major impact on their staff

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 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.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Harvard Business Review.