Emotions and the Organizational Fabric: Volume 10

Subject:

Table of contents

(21 chapters)
Abstract

This chapter provides novel theory that explicates how positive emotions of four actors (supervisors, employees, peers, and customers) in the service profit chain can foster the creation of positively deviant service businesses. It is suggested to incorporate studies and theories of positive organizational scholarship and particularly studies on positive emotions to the services marketing literature. This chapter elucidates how positively deviant behaviors, such as expressions of appreciation, helping others, gratitude, trustworthiness, and unselfishness, can foster the creation of such positively deviant performances that may generate supreme customer experience. These four positively deviant performances are trust in self and others, feeling of oneness, creativity, and seeing the bigger picture. The suggestion is that these positively deviant performances create climate for positivity in the supplier–customer interaction and foster the co-creation of mutual value in service businesses.

Abstract

This study investigates the situations in which productive organizational energy (POE) and organizational performance increase through customer passion, that is, perceived customers’ affective commitment and customers’ positive word-of-mouth behavior. We integrate research on POE with research on customer influences on employees. Based on emotional contagion processes we develop hypotheses for the energizing influences of customers at the organizational level. We test the hypotheses using a dataset containing 495 board members and 8,299 employees of 152 organizations. The results show that customer passion is positively related to POE, which is in turn positively related to organizational performance. Furthermore, the findings indicate that the effect of customer passion on organizational performance through POE depends on top management team’s (TMT’s) customer orientation. By providing first insights into the linkages and contingencies of customer passion, POE, and organizational performance, this study puts forth a more holistic understanding of the energizing effect of customers on organizations.

Abstract

What makes employees feel well within an organization? The aim of the present chapter is to start from a paradigm that emphasizes human relationality, affectivity, and intersubjective systems, and accordingly focuses on how well-being is emerging from contextual interrelations between employees. Applying this perspective to a qualitative study of nurses in a nursing home, I came to see the work community as a well-being-generating system in which the well-being of individual members is constructed together as an ongoing social accomplishment. In addition, I identified four systemic processes within the work community that greatly influence the well-being-generating capacity of the system.

Abstract

Aggression in the workplace has increasingly become a focus of organizational behavior research given its debilitating effects on employees and consistent links to reduced organizational performance. The current literature on workplace aggression presents a bewildering array of definitions with overlapping meanings creating confusion for researchers and academics. In response to this, we consider a range of definitions of workplace aggression and build a taxonomy of workplace aggressive behaviors based on four dimensions: intensity, impact, intentionality, and indirect/direct aggression. This chapter contributes to the field offering a taxonomy of aggressive behaviors at work that can be used in subsequent research.

Abstract

Studies show that discourses are important in legitimating emerging fields. However, we still lack understanding of how potential participants’ interpretations of discourses shape their involvement in emerging fields – particularly when the field’s definition is ambiguous. Drawing on an in-depth study of the emerging nanotechnology field we show that individuals’ affective responses to discourses play an important role in their decisions to participate. We find that discourse, expectations, affective responses, and participation in emerging fields are mutually constituted, and develop a model that shows these interconnections. Theoretically, our study expands understandings of discourse and field emergence by incorporating affect.

Abstract

As institutional theory increasingly looks to the micro-level for explanations of macro-level institutional processes, institutional scholars need to pay closer attention to the role of emotions in invigorating institutional processes. I argue that attending to emotions is most likely to enrich institutional analysis, if scholars take inspiration from theories that conceptualize emotions as relational and inter-subjective, rather than intra-personal, because the former would be more compatible with institutional theory’s relational roots. I review such promising theories that include symbolic interactionism, psychoanalytic and psychodynamic perspectives, moral psychology, and social movements. I conclude by outlining several possible research questions that might be inspired by attending to the role of emotions in institutional processes. I argue that such research can enrich the understanding of embedded agency, power, and the use of theorization by institutional change agents, as well as introduce a hereto neglected affective facet into the study of institutional logics.

Abstract

The impact that workplace aggression has on organizations and its members has become a focal point for organizational research. To date, studies have primarily examined the perpetrator of workplace aggression, specifically their personality traits. In this chapter, we draw on Institutional Theory to better understand a specific form of workplace aggression, indirect (covert) aggression. We specifically present a model that shows how the normative pressures and social roles within an institution influence the aggressive actions by employees as well as the scripts employees utilize in response to indirect aggression. We assert that an examination of how scripts are used to respond to indirect aggression will be especially helpful in understanding how institutional pressures influence this type of workplace aggression within organizations.

Abstract

Although institutional theorists have considered the potential role of emotions in institutional processes for decades, little empirical work has focused specifically on how inhabitants’ lived emotional experiences affect their engagement with the institutional context. In this chapter, we explore the emotional responses of women entering a traditionally all-male institution, the U.S. Naval Academy, immediately after it formally began enrolling women, but while still steeped in its traditional hypermasculine culture, and who experienced gender-based workplace bullying. We explore both the bullying and their responses based on social emotions, considering them both as targets of their male counterpart’s emotions and as inhabitants who experience their own emotional responses. We find a broad range of emotions are evident in incidents of bullying, that institutional conditions predicate a particular form of indirect bullying, and that some women engage in institutional work that transforms being the target of negative emotions such as hatred into more positive emotional responses such as pride.

Abstract

Displaying appropriate emotions enhances followers’ perceptions toward a leader. The present study examined the moderating effect of leader group-prototypicality on the relationship between leader’s emotion appropriateness and followers’ perceptions toward the leader (i.e., self-sacrifice intentions and effectiveness). Based on a set of 366 Malaysian students’ experimental survey responses, leader group-prototypicality emerged as a significant moderator. Specifically, the effect of leader’s emotion appropriateness was stronger for group-prototypical leaders than non-group-prototypical leaders. Hence, to enhance their perceived effectiveness, leaders should portray appropriate emotions and ensure that they are viewed as representative by their followers.

Abstract

This chapter examines how structural factors related to gender, managerial level, and economic sector could impact the level of experienced person/role conflict in management based on a representative survey conducted among managers in Norway. Person/role conflict appears relevant for understanding emotions in organizations and is linked with emotional dissonance and emotional labor through theoretical and empirical considerations. Our findings reveal that the effect of gender remains significant when controlled for economic sector and managerial level. This indicates that experienced person/role conflict can be partially caused by perceived incongruity between internalized and gender role-related expectations as well as managerial role-related expectations.

Abstract

This chapter introduces the concept of “competency labor” and illustrates its important role in organizational life for both researchers and practitioners. In the contemporary workplace environment individuals face increasing expectations of competence. However, demonstrating competence is no simple task – rather, to demonstrate competence requires a concerted effort in terms of individuals’ affect, cognition, and behavior. Accordingly, new models are needed that can explain these emergent processes. The present work integrates the literatures related to emotional labor and impression management, and builds a theory-based framework for investigating the processes (affective, cognitive, and behavioral) of making desired impressions of competency at work and how these processes impact critical individual and organizational outcomes. Our conceptual model proposes how growing demands in the workplace for individuals to display competence affect how they think, feel, as well as act. In sum, our work advocates that a new research stream is needed to better understand the “competency labor” phenomenon and its theoretical as well as practical implications.

Abstract

In this chapter, we develop and present the Multi-Perspective Multilevel Model of emotional labor in organizations. This model is based on three perspectives: (1) a service requirement, (2) an intra-psychic process, and (3) an emotional display, each involving five levels of analysis: within-person, between persons, in interpersonal exchanges, in groups, and across the organization as a whole. Our model is differentiated from earlier characterizations of emotional labor in that we propose that the phenomenon begins with energy generation instead of energy depletion; and is neither a one-way nor a one-by-one service episode. We further proffer that the intra-psychic processes embedded in emotional labor represent a form of social self-regulation that impacts across multiple levels within service organizations. We conclude by discussing the implications and limitations of our model for emotional labor research.

Abstract

Mindfulness helps improve effectiveness by facilitating the use of emotion as information, which improves learning, adaptation, and performance. When mindful we observe emotions and are curious about them rather than controlled by them, freeing us to explore what the emotion is telling us.

I discuss three forms of mindfulness that combine to create a pattern of behavior called mindful organizing. Mindful organizing has numerous benefits but there are also costs that must be balanced against the benefits. Bringing mindfulness into organizations must be done in a way that reduces costs and increases benefits; practical mindfulness is introduced as a means to do this.

Practical mindfulness begins with what is achievable at the present time and reduces the social and emotional barriers to behaving mindfully through the use of tools. Practical mindfulness recognizes the importance of interaction to task accomplishment by focusing attention on all three phases of interaction: before, during, and after.

DOI
10.1108/S1746-9791201410
Publication date
2014-08-14
Book series
Research on Emotion in Organizations
Editors
Series copyright holder
Emerald Publishing Limited
ISBN
978-1-78350-939-3
eISBN
978-1-78350-934-8
Book series ISSN
1746-9791