Jacob S. Levitt is a PhD candidate and Winkelman fellow in the Management Department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Starting July 2025 he will be an Assistant Professor at Indiana University—Kelley School of Business.
Jacob is a field-oriented, quantitative researcher who studies how leader and team emotions impact well-being and performance over time. His work has been published in leading management journals such as Organization Science. He grew up in a small college town in rural New England and earned his undergraduate degree in Psychology. Prior to starting the PhD he worked in Virginia for Capital One focusing on data analytics and machine learning.
Newly Published Research at Organization Science:
Timing Is Everything: An Imprinting Framework for the Implications of Leader Emotional Expressions for Team Member Social Worth and Performance
Jacob S. Levitt, Constantinos G.V. Coutifaris, Paul I. Green Jr., and Sigal G. Barsade
Abstract
Leader emotional expressions have profound implications for team members. Research has established that how frequently leaders express positive and negative emotional expressions shapes team member performance through conveying critical social-functional information about team member social worth. Yet, this social-functional approach to emotions has not fully considered how the timing of leader emotional expressions during a team’s lifecycle can also shape the information conveyed to individual team members about their social worth. In this paper, we integrate the social-functional approach to emotions with imprinting theory to propose that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions has performance implications for individual team members through two distinct facets of social worth: respect and status. Specifically, our imprinting framework explains how positive leader emotional expressions during the early team phase have the most beneficial performance implications through imprinting respect in individual team members. We then propose that these positive implications are amplified by more frequent than average negative leader emotional expressions during the midpoint phase. When filtered through earlier positive expressions, negative emotional expressions during the midpoint phase may signal opportunities for respect and status gains rather than respect and status losses. We find general support for our model in a pre-registered four-wave longitudinal archival study of consulting teams at a leading professional services company and a four-wave longitudinal field study at a NCAA Division 1 sports program. Our work highlights that the temporal context of leader emotional expressions is an important performance predictor through social worth.