The Influence Of Leadership Feedback On Subordinates' Cooperative Behavior And Its Neural Mechanis

Leaders exert influence on subordinates through feedback in a work place.Previous studies have confirmed that both the valence and appropriateness of leader’s emotional feedback would affect subordinates’ behavior.However,previous studies mainly focused on cross-sectional surveys and situational questionnaires,and only discussed the impact of leader’s emotional feedback on a single subordinate.While in real scene,leader often gave feedbacks for two or more subordinates.In the process,subordinates compared the valency and appropriateness of feedback from leaders,which may affect subsequent work behavior,and there was little research to investigate the effect of this compared results to subordinates cooperative behavior and its associated neural dynamics and neural synchronization mechanism.In this study,a new experimental paradigm was designed to study this problem.The experiment recruited two participants to complete the task for making money for the company.The specific task was to press the specified key on the keyboard as quickly as possible(one pressed D,the other pressed K).When the sum of the two pressed the number of times exceeded the threshold within a limited time,the bulb would turn on and earn 1 Yuan for their company.The threshold was set by the base speed of two participants,which made it difficult for one person to complete and requires the cooperation of both.After each round of the task,the wire connected with the bulb turned light for who pressed more,and dark for who pressed less,indicating the relative contribution for two participants.Then,a leader gave them emotional feedback with smiling or neutral faces,forming two factors of 2(previous performance: better vs.worse)×2(emotional feedback:positive vs.neutral),and increment number of keystroke in this trial comparing the last trial was dependent variable.In the discussion,the reasonable matching of job performance with leader’s feedback was regarded as the leader’s appropriate feedback condition,and vice versa was the inappropriate feedback condition.The results of the manipulation test in the pre-experiment showed that the leadership feedback valence and the appropriateness were effective.Behavioral results showed that the main effects of the two independent variables were significant.The feasibility of the new paradigm has tested in the preliminary experiment,and then the problem was studied through formal experiment.The paradigm in the formal experiment was as almost same as that in the preexperiment.In addition to recording the behavioral responses,EEG data of both participants were also recorded.Event-related potential(ERP)analysis found that a larger amplitude of FRN was induced when the subjects knew their performance was relatively worse,and a larger amplitude of P3 was induced when they knew their performance was better.These results showed that better or worse of their own performance would produce a similar psychological process of gain money or loss.In addition,under the same emotional feedback valence,inappropriate feedback induced larger N1 than appropriate feedback.Compared with neutral feedback,positive feedback of leaders induced larger SPW.Similar to N1,under the same emotional feedback,inappropriate feedback induced larger LPP than appropriate feedback.After receiving feedback from the leader,this study still used the increment number of keystroke in this round as the dependent variable of behavior.The behavioral results showed that the increment of keystroke after receiving inappropriate positive feedback was higher than appropriate positive feedback;and the increment number of keystroke after receiving inappropriate neutral feedback was lower than appropriate neutral feedback.These results showed that,compared with the appropriate leader feedback,the inappropriate leader feedback firstly attracted more attention resources,and then produced similar intensity but opposite emotional valence,which led to the subsequent separation of work effort.The cooperated performance results showed that the performance of successful cooperation under the leadership of appropriate traits was significantly higher than that under the leadership of inappropriate traits.The analysis of neural synchronization showed that there was a one-trail significant negative correlation between brain synchronization and cooperative performance in the two appropriateness conditions for10～12Hz during 0.75～1s after the feedback screen.The results of this study indicated that,in the process of the influence of the emotional feedback of leaders on the cooperation of subordinates,the appropriateness of the feedback of leaders firstly affected resources of attention,and induces the emotional response of different valence,and then affected the subsequent work effort.In addition,the appropriateness of the feedback would affect the synchronicity of the brain neurons during cooperation,and there was a quantitative relationship between the synchronicity and cooperative behavior.