A daily diary study on the affective path between leadership practices and leaders’ personal helping

While anecdotally we know that leaders vary in their willingness to help followers depending on the time of a day, this within-person variability is not well-understood in the leadership literature. Based on the Affective Events Theory, we take a temporal dynamic view to address this issue. Specifically, we propose that leaders’ engagement in leadership practices earlier in the workday will lead to positive affect later the same day, increasing their personal helping the next day. We used the experience sampling methodology and collected data from 120 full-time leaders three times a day over two consecutive workweeks to test our hypotheses (n = 839 observations). By identifying three types of daily leadership practices that trigger daily variations in leaders’ positive affect and personal helping, our research challenges the dominated view in the existing research that leaders’ personal helping is not static and it can be varied throughout a workday. JEL Classification: M50.