This study examines the complex connection between individuals' emotion recognition 18 capability and their emergence as leaders. It is hypothesized that emotion recognition and 19 extraversion interactively relate with an individual's task coordination behavior which, in turn, 20 influences the likelihood of emerging as a leader. In other words, we cast task coordination as a 21 mediating mechanism in the joint relationship between emotion recognition and extraversion, 22 on the one hand, and leader emergence, on the other. Study hypotheses were tested using 23 multisource data from two diverse, independent samples. Study 1 supports the hypothesized 24 relationships in a sample of student project teams in the Netherlands, and Study 2 25 constructively replicates the proposed model using student participants in an assessment 26 center in the United States. These findings were obtained using a performance-based test of 27 emotion recognition and controlling for a battery of known covariates.