What Have We Learned? Ten Years On: Volume 7

Charmine E. J. Härtel is management cluster leader and professor of human resource management and organizational development in the UQ Business School at The University of Queensland, Australia. She obtained her PhD in Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 1991 and is a registered organizational psychologist in Australia. Professor Härtel is a fellow and president-elect of the Australia and New Zealand Academy of Management. Her research and consulting focus on the individual, group, and organization-level qualities associated with positive work environments. Her work in the area of emotions includes development of a workgroup emotional climate scale, investigations of emotional experiences within diverse workgroups, examination of the role of emotions in moral and positive leadership, and studies of the affective dimension of organizational culture. Her pioneering work on the characteristics of positive work environments has identified a number of the drivers of unhealthy and toxic work environments along with the leadership and human resource management practices, organizational policies and strategies to turn such situations around. Professor Härtel's research has been awarded $2,996,000 in Australian Research Council funding, has appeared in over 70 journal articles, including leading peer-reviewed journals such as Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Leadership Quarterly, and Journal of Management. Professor Härtel is currently associate editor of the Academy of Management Learning and Education and Journal of Managerial Psychology. She is recipient of several awards including two postgraduate supervision awards, the Janet Chusmir Service Award from the US Academy of Management, and five awards for innovation in organizational practice. She has also published 10 edited volumes, is book series co-editor for Research on Emotion in Organizations (Emerald/JAI Press) and has authored two books including the textbook Human Resource Management (Pearson, 2010) which adopts a human well-being paradigm.

In this overview, the editors trace the history of 10 books they have helmed in what has become the legacy of the Emonet conferences. From the seeds planted in 1998 by a small group of international scholars assembled together at the first Emonet conference, the shift of the study of emotions in organizational studies from the almost “undiscussable” to mainstream scholarship is traced. Following this historical analysis, the story of “What have we learned? Ten years on,” the latest volume in the Emonet book series, is given. In a brief summary of each chapter in the current edition, the editors draw attention to eight topic areas to showcase the remarkable and broad-ranging advances in the field of organization studies that have been enabled by attention to the role of emotions in theory and practice in 10 years since the first publication in the book series. From advances in our knowledge and understanding of work, workers and consumers, to team behavior, leader-member exchange, and In Extremis work contexts, and methodological contributions in the assessment of noncognitive traits through to advances in knowledge of positive work environments, the reader is left in no doubt that organizational scholarship and practice has been deeply enriched through bringing emotions center stage.

The purpose of the current chapter is to meta-analytically examine the nomological network around emotional labor. The results show that negative display rules, high level of job demand, frequent contacts with customers, and lack of autonomy and social support are significantly related to surface acting, whereas display rules, opportunities to display various emotions, and frequent, intensive, and long time contacts with customers are significantly related to deep acting. Further, people high on negative affectivity and neuroticism are more likely to surface act, whereas people high on positive affectivity and extraversion are more likely to deep act. In addition, surface acting is mainly associated with undesirable work outcomes, whereas deep acting is mainly related to desirable work outcomes.

This chapter addresses how emotional labor relates to effort; an important mediator in the relationship between emotional labor strategies and important outcomes. To better understand how effort functions in these relationships, a new way of understanding emotional labor strategies is considered. This new approach accounts for effort profiles associated with different types of emotional labor. Consequently, three distinct categories of emotional labor strategies emerge; cause-focused, symptom-focused, and avoidance actions. These new categories are contrasted with the current dichotomous understanding of emotional labor strategies; surface and deep acting. How these three distinct sets of emotional labor strategies are specifically related to effort – and thus to outcomes of interest – is discussed and propositions are made. The implications of, and avenues for future research afforded by this new categorization of emotional labor are discussed.

This chapter investigated tactics used by customer service employees in performing emotion work during their interactions with customers and those internal to organizations. Based on a qualitative study in the hospitality industry, I discovered that customer service employees used a range of tactics that impact different phases of the emotion regulation process in order to facilitate emotion work. One group of tactics was directed towards the work context while the other was self-directed in an attempt to regulate the experience and expression of emotion. Taken together these two groups of tactics provide a holistic portrayal of the range of tactics used by customer service employees in performing emotion work.

Based on a study of 523 medical sales representatives, the present study investigates the relationships among employees' perception about organizational image, organizational support, and the way they perform their emotional labor during customer interaction. As predicted, the study found support for a positive relationship of both perceived organizational support and perceived external prestige with the way in which employees perform emotional labor. The study further found the importance of perceived external prestige of the organization in influencing the relationship between perceived organizational support and emotional labor. Implications of the study to practitioners and researchers were discussed.

This chapter looks at how work on emotions, particularly positive emotional states and perceptions of work, has provided the basis for gleaning new insights and understanding the work the engagement of independent professionals. We present the first set of results of the Entity Solutions11Independent Professional (IPro) is a contemporary term used to describe white collar contractors. IPro Index (ESII), the leading benchmark survey for identifying trends, issues and attitudes of IPros in Australia. Prior research indicates the important role that personality traits such as positive affectivity, self-efficacy and internal locus of control can have in determining a positive emotional state at work. These findings lead to the identification of five key areas of lifestyle (overall job satisfaction), well-being (engagement, psychological and emotional aspects), commitment to current client (workplace), perceived support from current client (workplace) and trends (current issues) which underlie the ESII. We use this research as a foundation for developing further understanding of the emotional experiences of those working outside of the traditional employer–employee relationship and in doing so, focus specifically on four of the key areas: job satisfaction, well-being, commitment and perceived organizational support. The descriptive results are derived from 365 responses gathered in an online survey conducted during June and July 2010 from IPros working in Australian organizations.

Emotions are part of everyday life and how we feel influences our behavior as a parent, child, partner, friend, employee, employer, consumer, and service provider. While there is extensive knowledge of decision-making in consumer behavior, little is known about consumer emotional responses (Bagozzi, Gopinath & Nyer, 1999) and the impact this has on organizations. Complaints that are not handled effectively can result in substantial damage to a company, both materially and to its reputation and relationships, in particular third party complaints which have a significant impact on organizations. This chapter provides a taxonomy of emotions expressed in complaint behavior to third parties based on analyses of transcripts of four focus groups' discussion of service failures and the events and feelings leading to complaint behavior to a third party. Our research demonstrates that consumers will pursue a service encounter gone wrong for days or months, feeling intense emotions that create severe physical consequences, even when the money at stake is trivial. We propose that the emotional motivations for complaints may be more powerful in driving behavior than previously recognized and that organizations need to address emotional concerns in a more-informed manner to achieve more effective complaint handling.

Poor complaint management may result in organizations losing customers and revenue. Consumers exhibit negative emotional responses when dissatisfied and this may lead to a complaint to a third-party organization. Since little information is available on the role of emotion in the consumer complaint process or how to manage complaints effectively, we offer an emotions perspective by applying Affective Events Theory (AET) to complaint behavior. This study presents the first application of AET in a consumption context and advances a theoretical framework supported by qualitative research for emotional responses to complaints. In contrast to commonly held views on gender and emotion, men as well as women use emotion-focused coping to complain.

Previous research on emotional labor has typically been conducted at the individual level of analysis, despite the fact that many organizations have incorporated work teams into their business model. The use of work teams turns emotional management into a group task on which employees work as a collective. The present chapter proposes a conceptual model that describes the antecedents and consequences of team-level emotional labor. We propose that work groups often impose positive display rules (express integrative emotion) and negative display rules (suppress differentiating emotions) on their members. Positive display rules generally trigger group-level deep acting, whereby teammates seek to change their internal feelings. Negative display rules generally trigger surface acting, whereby teammates retain their actual emotions but do not actually express differentiating feelings. These two dimensions of emotional labor, for their part, impact emotional exhaustion. Deep acting one's positive emotions lowers emotional exhaustion and surface acting increases it. We discuss the consequences of our model for workplace behavior, such as performance. We also discuss how the relationships involving emotional labor change when one considers these constructs at the group-level of analysis.

Researchers in the field of leadership are increasingly turning their attention to the concept of emotional intelligence (EI) to better understand how aspects of individual difference may help to explain variations in leadership behavior. Importantly leadership practices that foster positive affectivity have been found to be associated with important job- and work-related outcomes. This study aims to investigate whether EI moderates the relationship between a measure of leader–member exchange (LMX) and important work-related outcomes within Malaysia. LMX was found to be positively associated with organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, psychological well-being (PWB), and in-role performance. However, the relationship between LMX and job satisfaction, LMX and organizational commitment, LMX and PWB, and LMX and in-role performance was also found to be moderated by EI. The findings suggest that EI can help leaders and subordinates to facilitate stronger identification and emotional attachments with each other.

This chapter focuses on management of emotions in an emergency setting. More specifically, how do emergency call takers manage double-faced emotional management – i.e., their own and the caller's emotions – simultaneously? By triangulating interviews, observations, and organizational documentation with theories on emotional management multiple strategies were identified. The range of strategies included hiving (selecting and modifying) calls, elaborating on (by deploying attention and reshaping/reappraising) content of calls, auralizing (by externalizing an emotional barrier) as well as taming emotional expression. The set of emotional management strategies are concluded in a Heat-model. The model is further discussed in terms of performance efficiency; in terms of how emotional aspects may interfere with decision-making capabilities as well as how wellbeing can be maintained for call takers.

The present chapter addresses a topic that is of growing interest – namely, the exploration of alternative item response theory (IRT) models for noncognitive assessment. Previous research in the assessment of trait emotional intelligence (or “trait emotional self-efficacy”) has been limited to traditional psychometric techniques (e.g., classical test theory) under the notion of a dominance response processes describing the relationship between individuals' latent characteristics and individuals' response selection. The present study, presents the first unfolding IRT modeling effort in the general field of emotional intelligence (EI). We applied the Generalized Graded Unfolding Model (GGUM) in order to evaluate the response process and the item properties on the short form of the trait emotional intelligence questionnaire (TEIQue-SF). A sample of 866 participants completed the English version of the TEIQue-SF. Results suggests that the GGUM has an adequate fit to the data. Furthermore, inspection of the test information and standard error functions revealed that the TEIQue-SF is accurate for low and middle scores on the construct; however several items had low discrimination parameters. Implications for the benefits of unfolding models in the assessment of trait EI are discussed.

The study explores the antecedent and consequences of sales employees' authenticity of emotional expression during customer interactions. Based on a survey of 468 medical sales representatives (MSRs) in India, the study found a significant effect of authenticity of emotional expression on employees' well-being and turnover intention. Organizational identification was found to be an antecedent of authenticity of emotional expression. The mediation effect of authenticity of emotional expression in explaining the relationship between organizational identification and well-being was supported. However, contrary to the hypothesis, the study found no mediation effect of authenticity of emotional expression on the relationship between organizational identification and turnover intention. The study addresses an important yet neglected issue: how authenticity might meaningfully contribute to the advancement of theory and practice in business.

Over the past decades the devastating issue of workplace bullying and its “cancerous” impact on workplace emotions has seen “today's costliest secret” become exposed (Einarsen, Hoel, Zapf & Cooper, 2003, p. 32; Glendinning, 2001, p. 296; Needham, 2003, p. 12). Bullying at work has become so prevalent within today's workplace that 1 of the 4 of us are estimated to suffer the crippling abuse of the workplace bully, costing Australian organizations between $17 billion and $36 billion each year (Clarke, J. (2005). Working with monsters: How to identify and protect yourself from the workplace psychopath. Sydney: Random House Australia; Rayner, C. (2000). Building a business case for tackling bullying in the workplace: Beyond a cost-benefit analysis. In: Sheehan, M., Ramsey, C., & Patrick, J. (Eds), Transcending boundaries. Proceedings of the 2000 Conference, September, Brisbane). The impending doom faced by the target of the bully demeans the individual to such an extent that bullying has been associated with suicide, post-traumatic stress disorder, and even increased risk of coronary heart disease and has been demonstrated to sever “at home” relationships, with grave implications on work-life balance (Archer, 1999; Geffner, Braverman, Galasso & Marsh, 2004; Lewis, 2006). Yet despite the significant lose–lose outcomes of workplace bullying for both the individual and the well-documented consequences of decreased productivity for the organization, there seems to be little progress toward meaningfully addressing the issues that actually create, promote, and sustain workplace bullying (Bolton, 2007; Dutton & Ragins, 2007; Heames & Harvey, 2006; Peyton, 2003). Rather than narrowly concentrating on bullying and its drivers which limits workplace bullying to an occupational health and safety issue, this chapter demonstrates the practical implementation across five Victorian public sector organizations of a tool developed using the principles of positive psychology. This approach places bullying in the wider context of positive workplace emotions, allowing for consideration of the broader organizational characteristics and the subtle negative behaviors which are suggested to underlie the deep seated and pervasive nature of workplace bullying. The preliminary findings suggests that the tool was seen as valuable in creating a bully-free culture and resonates practically by offering insights into some of the issues organizations should consider to ensure such initiatives provide a genuine source of competitive advantage.