The relationship between emotion regulation and sustainable leadership: The mediating role of social safeness

Emotional factors in leaders have been found to be important in practicing sustainable leadership. Recent studies have highlighted that leaders with adaptive emotional regulation tend to exhibit sustainable leadership more frequently. However, it is not clear why emotional regulation can enable leaders to act sustainably with their followers. We aim to investigate whether being able to feel safe in social contexts may be a factor that explains the relationship between emotional regulation and sustainable leadership. N = 413 managers filled out self-report questionnaires assessing emotion dysregulation, social safeness, and sustainable leadership. Women showed high social safeness than males, whereas no gender differences were found in levels of emotional dysregulation and sustainable leadership. The hypothesized mediation model was tested, showing both a direct effect of emotional dysregulation on sustainable leadership, and an indirect effect, via social safeness. This result has important implications for the possibility of creating business programs focused on emotional regulation.