EMOTIONAL TONE EMBEDDED IN LEADERSHIP ITEMS AND MEMORY PROCESSING: IMPLICATIONS FOR LEADERSHIP MEASUREMENT

Leadership research has predominantly relied on recollective self-report questionnaires to collect leadership ratings. Understanding respondents’ memory processing plays an important role in enhancing response process validity and facilitating better alignment between theory and measurement in leadership research. However, we have limited understanding in terms of leadership item-level factors that may influence respondents’ memory processing. Moreover, extant research has largely focused on the impact of the cognitive (vs. affective) aspect of memory processing on leadership measurement. This study fills the void by elucidating the effect of emotional tone embedded in leadership items on memory processing as well as how the permutation of leadership items and their response scale format (i.e., Likert versus binary) may moderate this relationship. The episodic versus semantic memory paradigm and the parallel remember versus know judgment are employed to capture memory processing. The counterintuitive findings from the mixed-effects model shed light on alternative mechanisms that may be at play in memory processing and bear important implications for future research.