Educational leadership within institutions is an emotional process in which leaders express emotions and try to arouse them in their colleagues. Concurrently with a growing literature on institutional environment, leader-colleague emotional exchange, and individual and institutional psychodynamics, a focus of research and studies has tilted towards the exploration of the awareness and utilization of leaders’ and colleagues’ emotions within institutions. With reference to public and private sector higher education institutions (HEIs) in Karachi, how and when do the educational leaders use their emotions for their institution’s functioning and whether their emotions have any effect on the administrative, academic and other institutions related affairs, is an area to explore.Since the study on the relationship between designated educational leaders’ (DELs) emotions and institutional functioning approaches is relatively new in the field of psychodynamics of leadership in education, the study adopted an exploratory-sequentialdesign of mixed-method approach to explore the awareness and extent to which the educational leaders utilize emotions for their respective higher education institutions’ (HEI) functioning. The study participants were DELs serving at the executive, administrative and operative levels of the public and private HEIs in Karachi. This study aims to explore DELs’ awareness and stance on the use of their emotions in different institutional processes of goal orientation, decision making, and human relations, at different levels of their HEIs. The aspect of the psychodynamics of educational leadership in the HEIs, the involvement of DELs’ self-reported emotions in effective institutional functioning, defining of leadership styles, skills and approaches on psychodynamic and other selected theoretical inter-linkages have contributed to the existing literature on educational leadership.