Beyond discrete emotions: An examination of emotional ambivalence in leadership

Emotional ambivalence – the experience of dual-valenced emotions – is becoming increasingly relevant to the process of leadership. Leaders are consistently faced with nuanced, complex situations that simultaneously elicit positive and negative emotions. Despite increased empirical investigations into leader emotional ambivalence at work (Rothman et al., 2017; Rothman & Melwani, 2017), leader emotion theorizing makes critical assumptions that limit understanding of the cognitive and social role of emotional ambivalence in the social process of leadership, including the leaders themselves and those that interact with leaders. I conduct a systematic literature review to show how past work conceptualizing emotional ambivalence as the experience of conflicting emotions and the default treatment of leader emotions as singular can be misleading. In this dissertation, I advance the definition of emotional ambivalence beyond emotional conflict and outline a new integrative process of leader emotions including the appraisal, experience, expression, and perception of complex emotions and their general outcomes.