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This chapter provides background information on the human emotions process, differentiating between processes that are spontaneous and automatic and those that can be regulated with intentional effort. The chapter then also highlights two constructs, emotional labor and emotional intelligence, that naturally derive from the emotion process and are prevalent in the workplace. These two constructs are important to understand from a theoretical and empirical perspective to identify and manage them most effectively in library work settings. The chapter is a general review of some key concepts citing seminal and exemplar literature from the fields of organizational behavior, psychology, and library and information science to support and illustrate the ideas presented. The value of the chapter is first as an orientation to the science behind emotions. To more fully understand how and why emotion is such a force in the workplace, it is necessary to understand the emotion process. Further, the chapter adds practical value by presenting the constructs of emotional labor and emotional intelligence and including suggestions for how employees and managers can most effectively harness the power of emotions in ways that are most productive for individual employees as well as to achieve organizational goals.

This qualitative study investigated how small group communication influences the development of shared mental models in a committee of public librarians addressing a problem-solving task. It examines the influence of communication themes, functions, roles, and rules on the group's development of shared mental models about the task and about team interaction. Data were collected over the course of a year from group meetings, email messages, group documents, and participant interviews and then analyzed using existing coding schemes and qualitative coding techniques. The findings indicate that within the group there was a strong superficial convergence around the task mental model and the team interaction mental model but a weaker convergence at a deeper level. Analysis of the group communication data shows that the group focused discussion on understanding the problem and identifying tasks, enacting group roles and rules that facilitated sharing information. The functions of their messages focused on task communication. The findings suggest that, in this group, communication themes most heavily influenced the development of a shared mental model about the task, while communication roles, rules, and functions were more influential toward the development of a shared mental model about team interaction. Implications for practice include adopting intentional tactics for surfacing mental models at various points in the group life and anchoring the emerging model within the collective cognition of the group through devices such as narratives, objects, or documentary materials.

Chasing articles for this series over the past 17 years has led me to look at a wide variety of studies and to come to understand much about what librarians and LIS scholars think about when they consider management and leadership. Most of that work has come from people who work in or write primarily about academic libraries, given that it is that group who are most likely to seek doctorates and publish as they pursue tenure and promotion. While much that has been written can apply to work in other kinds of libraries and other nonprofit organization, it is always rewarding to find good work that relates to public and school libraries. This year, we have done that, and four of the six chapters here relate directly to these organizations. A fifth talks about interpersonal dynamics in cataloging organizations, another often neglected area in library management literature.