The Emotion of Admiration Improves Employees’ Goal Orientations and Contextual Performance

Admiration is the other-praising emotion elicited by the display of outstanding skills, talents, or achievements. Most leadership theories state that effective leaders are admired role models that followers emulate. Nevertheless, no demonstration has been provided so far about the actual role of admiration in the leader-follower relationship. This paper shows that leaders who display technical and managerial competences motivate employees by means of the positive emotion of admiration they elicit. Specifically, we hypothesized and demonstrated that admiration elicited in employees by their leader’s skills increases both their goal orientation to prove and improve their own skills and their contextual performance. In a first field experiment on 137 sales representatives we observed an indirect positive relationship between leader’s skills and followers’ state-goal orientations. Admiration mediated the positive effect of leader’s skills on employees’ motivation. In this study, we also observed a direct and detrimental impact of leaders’ skills on employees learning and proving goal orientations. In a second, cross-sectional, study on 146 full-time teachers we observed that admiration –compared with happiness and gratitude– is the best predictor of state-learning-goal orientation and organizational citizenship behaviors. Implications and limits are discussed.