Affirmative or Threatening: The Role of Romantic Partner’s Affect in Leader Identity Management

The self-perception of an individual in a leadership role, referred to as leader identity, is central to a leader’s self-understanding and effectiveness. Building on previous work suggesting that leaders construct leader identity through interactions, I extend the current focus to interactions between leaders and their romantic partners. Drawing from the cross-domain leadership development model and the emotion as social information model, I propose a theoretical framework that illustrates how a partner’s positive and negative affect toward one’s leadership role may influence leader identity and leadership behaviors through both affective and inferential pathways via leader affect and leadership self-efficacy. Moreover, I suggest that a leader’s self-verification motive serves as a critical contingency that shapes how they notice and interpret identity cues. To test the proposed model, I conducted a multi-source, time-lagged study of 168 leader–partner dyads. The findings demonstrate that partner positive affect toward one’s leadership role had indirect effects on leader identity and task-, person-, and change-oriented leadership behaviors via leadership self-efficacy. Moreover, partner negative affect also had negative indirect effects on leader identity and leader behaviors via leader negative affect. Additionally, the leader’s self-verification motive was a significant moderator that influenced these relationships. This research contributes to the leader identity literature by identifying the role of partner affect toward one’s leadership role and the mechanisms that link it to leader identity salience and enactment.