Guidance for Growth: Instrumental Leadership and the Path to Recovery Through Energy

Leadership has rarely been examined as an antecedent of employees’ recovery experiences, and instrumental leadership remains largely unexplored in this context. Drawing on a self-regulation perspective, we propose that instrumental leadership is associated with employees’ recovery experiences through employees’ cognitive engagement and positive emotions during work, while task interdependence may shape the effectiveness of instrumental leadership. We further propose cognitive engagement and positive emotions are associated with employees’ recovery experiences. Using an experience sampling methodology, we collected 2118 daily observations from 229 employees working in the South Korean construction industry. Results indicated on days when employees experienced higher levels of instrumental leadership, they also reported greater cognitive engagement and positive emotions. Cognitive engagement demonstrated consistent positive relationships with relaxation and mastery experience, whereas positive emotions were positively associated only with mastery experience. In addition, cognitive engagement showed a more consistent indirect relationship between instrumental leadership and recovery experiences than positive emotions. Contrary to our expectations, task interdependence did not significantly moderate the relationships between instrumental leadership and cognitive engagement or positive emotions. Overall, these findings suggest that task-oriented leadership behaviors may contribute to employees’ daily recovery experiences primarily through cognitive self-regulatory processes, with more limited evidence for emotional processes.