“Emergent leadership”—the ascription of informal leadership responsibilities among team members—is a dynamic phenomenon that comes into place through social interactions. Yet, theory remains sparse about the importance of verbal behaviors for emergent leadership in self-managed teams over a team’s lifecycle. Adopting a functional perspective on leadership, we develop a temporal account that links changes in task-, change-, and relations-oriented communication to emergent leadership in early, middle, and late team phases. We test the hypothesized relationships in 42 teams that provided round-robin emergent leadership ratings and videotapes of their first, midterm, and final meetings. Team members’ verbal behaviors were captured using fine-grained empirical interaction coding. Multilevel modeling showed that task-oriented communication was a stable positive predictor of emergent leadership at all time points. Change-oriented communication predicted emergent leadership at the start of a project and diminished in relevance at the midterm and final meetings. Relations-oriented communication gained importance, such that an increase in relations-oriented behaviors toward the project end predicted emergent leadership. We discuss theoretical implications for conceptualizing the behavioral antecedents of emergent leadership from a time- and context-sensitive perspective.

We study the emotive aspect of institutional work performed by U.S. animal rights organizations (AROs) attempting to disrupt industrial practices in modern factory farming operations perceived to be abusive to animals. Drawing on an inductive, qualitative analysis of interviews with ARO advocates, as well as textual and visual archival data collected from AROs' websites, we argue that the suppression of emotion plays a critical role in AROs' disruptive work. We find that advocates are motivated to suppress their emotions by a perceived incompatibility between their reactive emotional displays and their affective commitment to institutional work, or what we label reactive-affective conflict. We show how two triggers of reactive-affective conflict-potential supporters' investment in the status quo and emotive norms governing institutional work-encourage ARO advocates to suppress their emotions in face-to-face interactions with audiences while attempting to elicit emotions via visuals as their strategy of disruptive work. We contribute to the literature on the strategic use of emotion in institutional work by highlighting important relationships between the characteristics of potential supporters, the nature of institutional work, and institutional workers' management of their own emotions to further their institutional projects. In doing so, we add needed nuance to extant conceptualizations of how emotion is strategically deployed as part of purposeful efforts to create, maintain, and disrupt institutions.

We develop a model of dual identity affirmation through which professionals make sense of their career and family identities by incorporating past and future identity enactment into present self-concepts, and by enacting suspended career or family identities in fleeting momentary ways. The model emerged from a qualitative inductive study of professionals whose career identities had been affirmed by achieving early career success recognized by a 40 Under 40 Award. Identity affirmation often sparked career and family identity threat that individuals resolved through time-bending sensemaking. During times of family focus, early achievers attained a sense of dual identity affirmation by believing that they had in the past (identity residue), or would again in the future (identity projection), focus on the career role, mitigating career identity threat. During periods of career focus, they similarly projected future or remembered past family involvement to mitigate family identity threat. Early achievers also found more fleeting ways to maintain their identities in identity bursts that helped them resolve threat to their career or family identity while the other was taking precedence. Three identity patterns emerged: identity bursts anchored chronic accelerating, while residue was key to lane switching; seasonalizing was anchored by both residue and projecting.