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