The Importance of Leader Recovery for Leader Identity and Behavior

For individuals who hold leadership positions in their organizations, identifying as a leader day-to-day can have significant implications for their performance and interactions with followers. Despite the importance of leader identity, however, little is known about how leaders can start their workday in a cognitive state that allows them to identify more strongly with their leader role. Integrating recovery research with leader identity theory, we investigated the implications of psychological detachment and affect-focused rumination for leader identity and leader performance on a day-to-day basis at work.We conducted two experience sampling studies to test our expectations. In the first experience sampling study, we found that psychological detachment after hours helped leaders identify more strongly with their leader role the next day because they felt recuperated (i.e., lower levels of depletion), whereas affect-focused rumination after hours hindered leader identity via depletion. In turn, leader identity influenced leaders’ enactment of transformational behaviors and power that day at work, as rated by their followers. We also found that the downstream effects of affect-focused rumination on leader behaviors via depletion and leader identity were weaker for more (vs. less) experienced leaders. We constructively replicated the negative effects of depletion on transformational behaviors and enacted power via leader identity in a supplemental experience sampling study using leaders’ self-reports of their behaviors. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of our research for leaders at work.