As digitalization increasingly generates challenges and opportunities for future leaders, organizations leverage promising technologies to navigate their digital transformation. Social robots represent one such technology, where robots designed for human-like interactions are used in contexts like customer experience, education, or elderly care. Their ability to be in leadership positions and influence human followers, however, is largely unexplored. First evidence suggests that robot leadership can be successful, however, specific leadership styles have not yet been studied in robot leaders. To fill this empirical gap, we implemented three robot leadership styles in the social robot Pepper by SoftBank Robotics behavior (i.e., transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and minimal leadership as control) and investigated how Executive MBA students and university students (N = 218) worked for those robot leaders in a between-participants experiment. We have found that the transformational robot leader increased likability and perceived safety, whereas the transactional robot led to higher negative affect and stress. Additionally, likability and stress indirectly mediated the influence of the robot’s leadership style on the participants’ task engagement. These results indicate that the effects on human followers after engaging with a robot leader mirror the findings of leadership research on human leaders. Our study is a first step in establishing to what degree evidence based on human leaders applies to robot leaders as well. We discuss its implications for theory and practice.