Emotional acknowledgment, which involves verbally recognizing others' emotions, can foster positive relationships in the workplace. Despite its many benefits, people may at times withhold emotional acknowledgment, particularly in the workplace where formal reporting relationships, such as those between leaders and followers, can hinder emotional connections. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate that followers tend to withhold acknowledging their leader's emotions, despite being relatively comfortable acknowledging the emotions of their peers, followers, or the emotions of others in general. We then leverage social exchange theory to propose and show that when followers do dare to acknowledge their leader’s emotions, their leaders tend to reciprocate and acknowledge their followers' emotions, creating a healthy team emotional culture which ultimately improves team performance. We find across two sets of multi-method studies including an interactive team laboratory experiment, two field surveys, and three pre-registered online studies that followers tend to withhold acknowledging the emotions of their leaders (Studies 1a-1c), but when followers do dare to acknowledge their leader’s emotions, their leaders are more likely to acknowledge their follower’s emotions in return, which ultimately improves team performance (Studies 2a-2c). Our findings offer implications to understand how followers can play a crucial role in initiating positive (and negative) emotional cycles within their teams at work.
