Leadership in the locker room: How the intensity of leaders' unpleasant affective displays shapes team performance.

Research has documented conflicting evidence about the relationship between a leader's unpleasant affective displays and team performance. Drawing on the dual threshold model of anger, we propose a novel explanation for this paradox such that the positive relationship between leaders' unpleasant affect and team performance turns negative at high levels of intensity. We examined our hypothesis in a multilevel field study of 304 halftime locker room speeches involving 23 high school and college basketball teams and a follow-up experiment.