Abstract: Owing to the increasingly dynamic and complex external environment, informal leadership is beneficial to teams in effectively changing procedures and coordination, which is favored by practitioners and scholars. However, dispute exists regarding whether leadership emergence can improve employees’ job performance, so the relationship between them and its mechanism need to be further explored. Drawing on the cognitive appraisal theory and through 507 dyads (87 supervisors and 507 subordinates), we examine the dual-path model of leadership emergence, involving strengthening path and weakening path, to explain why and when leadership emergence affects employees’ job performance. The results show that leadership emergence not only improves employees’ strengths use which in turn increases employees’ job performance, but also aggravates employees’ image risk, which in turn decreases employees’ job performance. In addition, distributed leadership can enhance the positive indirect effect of leadership emergence on employees’ job performance via strengths use, and buffer the negative effect of leadership emergence on employees’ job performance via image risk. These findings offer significant implications for theoretical research and practices.

Key words: leadership emergence, strengths use, image risk, job performance, distributed leadership