Regulating and emerging: Extrinsic affect improvement and the emergence of leadership.

Emotions are powerful tools through which formal leaders influence their followers, whether by overt emotional displays or deliberate attempts to regulate their own and others' emotions. This raises the following question: Can the strategic effort to regulate others' emotions help team members emerge as informal leaders? This work demonstrates that extrinsic emotion regulation-a goal-directed action aimed at regulating team members' emotions-can enable individuals to rise to informal leadership positions. We hypothesize that team members who improve group emotions emerge as informal leaders. This was tested in two studies. In Study 1 (a lab study on 25 ad hoc groups;