In today's rapidly changing work demands, supervisors often encounter diverse work requirements and multiple role expectations, leading supervisors to express ambivalent emotions towards the subordinates. Drawing on the emotions as social information (EASI) model, we posit that supervisors' expressed emotional ambivalence increases subordinate creativity via affective pathway. Simultaneously, it also increases subordinates’ avoidance of supervisors through cognitive pathway. Moreover, we include leader-member exchange (LMX) as the critical boundary conditions, moderating the effects of supervisors' expressed emotional ambivalence on subordinate behaviors. Using an experimental study using an event recall method and a field study with a multi-source, multi-phase design, our findings reveal that supervisors' expression of emotional ambivalence functions as a double-edged sword. On the positive side, supervisors' expressed emotional ambivalence enhances subordinates' experience of emotional ambivalence, which in turn, fosters subordinate creativity via information searching and encoding. On the negative side, in high-LMX relationships, supervisors’ expressed emotional ambivalence enhances subordinate perceived unpredictability, which leads subordinates to avoid their supervisors due to enhanced cognitive rumination.
