Contemporary companies should inspire their employees to invest their resources in the job (e.g., emotional engagement) through organizational management mechanisms (e.g., leadership) and also should pay attention to mitigate their negative behaviors (e.g., emotional exhaustion) at the same time (Zeng et al., 2020; Stoyanova and Stoyanov, 2021). Indeed, previous studies have paid attention to exploring the antecedent of emotional exhaustion, but, to date, there is no study to examine how leadership can increase emotional engagement, which in turn, reduce emotional exhaustion with the moderating effect of emotional resources. In common practice, emotional exhaustion is not a trivial concept, because it affects many economic factors, such as negative work behavior (Ding et al., 2018) and turnover intention (Lee et al., 2019). Past research of emotional exhaustion almost uses the job demand-resources model to examine intervention strategies, such as social support (Baeriswyl et al., 2016), job resources (Moreno-Jiménez et al., 2021), and emotional labor (Zhu et al., 2021), but little study employs emotional regulation perspective to explore the intervention strategies of emotional exhaustion. Indeed, emotional exhaustion means a feeling of exhaustion for emotional resources (Maslach et al., 2001), so emotional engagement should be a key antecedent to emotional exhaustion. Therefore, this research borrows emotional engagement from Kahn's theory (Kahn, 1990) to be a key antecedent variable of emotional exhaustion. Kahn's theory (Kahn, 1990) believes that an individual invests cognitive resources (cognitive engagement), emotional resources (emotional engagement), and physical resources (physical engagement) into role performance because the individual obtains meaningfulness, safety, and confidence from his or her job. In addition, a leader can shape a subordinate's value to meet a company value, and the company value can be delivered in the leadership process, which will increase the subordinate's meaningfulness of job. Therefore, leadership will increase emotional engagement, and then will decrease emotional exhaustion.

Although past research has paid attention to emotional resources in the multidisciplinary field (e.g., Wright et al., 2013; Liu et al., 2019; Ramchandran et al., 2020), the boundary condition of emotional resources is less investigated. Indeed, emotional resources are almost seen as an important antecedent variable on positiv behaviors (Agnoli et al., 2019; Kun et al., 2019; Peláez-Fernández et al., 2021) and negative employee behaviors (Golonka et al., 2017; Fiorilli et al., 2019; Valente and Lourenço, 2020) in previous studies. Therefore, this research proposes that emotional resources will moderate the relationship between emotional engagement and emotional exhaustion because a subordinate who has a higher level of emotional resources can optimize emotional resources to mitigate more emotional exhaustion by the effects of more emotional engagement.

This research addresses an emotional regulation model to predict emotional exhaustion in Figure 1.

This research adopts work engagement theory (Kahn, 1990) to address an emotional regulation model that describes how leadership affects emotional engagement and emotional exhaustion. The past study doesn't explore the mechanism of leadership on these variables, and thus this research provides incremental contributions to these fields.

The previous study also ignores how emotional resources can moderate the relationship between emotional engagement and emotional exhaustion, so this research also provides an incremental contribution to the literature on emotional resources. Indeed, emotional resources should be seen as a moderator because they cannot only increase positive employee behaviors but also decrease negative employee behaviors.

Finally, contemporary firms must deal with negative employee behaviors to realize competitive advantages, and this research addresses leadership as an optimal path. Indeed, leadership is a good thing to guide employees toward positive attitudes, so these employees must show high performance and satisfaction. This research thus suggests that firms should incorporate leadership into education training courses to improve supervisors' leadership ability.

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

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