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While emotions and feelings arise in the singular personality, they may also develop a normative dimensionality in a plural agency. The authors identify the cybernetic systemic principles of how emotions might be normatively regulated and affect plural agency performance. The purpose of this paper is to develop a generic cultural socio-cognitive trait theory of plural affective agency (the emotional organization), involving interactive cognitive and affective traits, and these play a role within the contexts of Mergers and Acquisitions (M & A).

The authors integrate James Gross’ model of emotion regulation with the earlier work on normative personality in the context of Mindset Agency Theory. The agency is a socio-cognitive entity with attitude, and operates through traits that control thinking and decision making. These traits are epistemically independent and operate on a bipolar scale; with the alternate poles having an auxiliary function to each other – where the traits may take intermediary “balanced” states between the poles.

Processes of affect regulation are supposed to go through three stages: first, identification (affective situation awareness); second, elaboration of affect is constituted through schemas of emotional feeling, which include emotion ideologies generating emotional responses to distinct contextual situations; third, execution: in the operative system primary emotions are assessed through operative intelligence for any adaptive information and the capacity to organize action; and turned into action, i.e. responses, through cultural feeling rules and socio-cultural display rules, conforming to emotion ideologies.

This new theory provides guidance for framing multilevel interaction where smaller collectives (as social systems) are embedded into larger social systems with a culture, an emotional climate and institutions. Thus, it is providing a generic theoretical frame for M & A analyses, where a smaller social unit (the acquired) is to be integrated into a larger social unit (the acquirer).

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion regulation is a prerequisite of managerial intelligence, which is at demand during M & A processes. While managerial intelligence may be grossly defined as the capacity of management to find an appropriate and fruitful balance between action and learning orientation of an organization, its affective equivalent is the capacity of management to find a fruitful balance between established emotion expression and learning alternate forms of emotion expression.

Understanding interdependencies between cognition and emotion is a prerequisite of social, cultural and emotional intelligence. The provided theory can be easily linked with empirical work on the emergence of a cultural climate of fear within societies. Thus, “Affective Agency Theory” also has a bearing for political systems’ analysis, what, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.

The paper builds on the recently developed Mindset Agency Theory, elaborating it through the introduction of the dimension of affect, where cognitive and affective traits interact and become responsible for patterns of behaviour. The model is providing a framework which links emotion expression and emotion regulation with cognitive analysis.

Purpose: This chapter explores how organizations can influence the emotional climate surrounding change, and thereby encourage the emergence of positive rather than negative emotions. Despite growing literature, many companies struggle with postacquisition integration. In the last 3 decades, the discussion has turned toward how employees' emotions complicate the process. This chapter discusses those emotions, paying special attention to the emotional climate surrounding change. The focus is on examining how an organization's emotional climate influences employees' emotions following an acquisition.

Design/methodology/approach: The chapter takes the acquired company point of view, following a German–Finnish deal completed in January 2017 over 1 year. Data were collected through interviews (totaling 26), daily memo-like diaries (65 entries), and an employee satisfaction survey (56 respondents).

Findings: The findings reveal that employees are likely to have emotional reactions even when relatively little integration is intended. In addition, the surrounding emotional climate – whether positive or negative – is likely to trigger similarly valenced emotions. The theoretical contribution of this chapter lies in the introduction of emotional climate rather than organizational culture as a key factor for employees during the early integration period.

Practical implication: Particularly line managers have an important role in maintaining positivity. For positivity to dominate, organizations need to make the benefits of the deal and the future of the company clear to the employees.

Western research on teams has paid an increasing attention to team's emotional process and corresponding outcomes. However, there were seldom studies examining the influence mechanism of team leader emotional intelligence on subordinate outcomes in teams, and the previous studies often neglected the team context. The aim of the study is to explore the cross‐level effect of team leader emotional intelligence and team emotional climate on team member job satisfaction.

Questionnaire survey on 148 team leaders and 840 team members was conducted. The paper applied hierarchical linear modeling analyses with the software HLM 6.06 to test the hypotheses.

The analyses on the matched sample showed that team negative emotional climate has negative effect on team member job satisfaction, and team emotional climate moderates the relationship between leader emotional intelligence and team member job satisfaction such that leader emotional intelligence has stronger effect on member job satisfaction as team emotional climate becomes more negative.

First, it is a single time period study and cross‐sectional research design, which limits our ability to make causal inferences about the relationships proposed. Second, team leader emotional intelligence was reported by team leader themselves, and it will be better to combine self‐report and other‐report measures of emotional intelligence in the future study.

This study extends the existing theory through a cross‐level framework that examines how team emotional climate interacts with team leader emotional intelligence to affect member job satisfaction, thus enriches the studies on emotional intelligence and leadership, team emotional climate and team effectiveness. The study also provides evidence of group‐level emotion in China, a non‐Western cultural country, which enriches the existing body of studies sampling exclusively from Western cultural groups and the research of emotions in organizations at group level.

Purpose: Work-related emotional exposure is a fundamental job characteristic in all kinds of service jobs from sales to law enforcement and corrections and from human services (nursing, counseling) to legal services. But formalized job descriptions are surprisingly silent about the emotional issues accompanying the jobs and roles service workers perform. This is surprising because formalized job descriptions are the foundation of job design, HR, and leadership practices that positively affect employee, customer, and organizational outcomes. Study Design/Methodology/Approach: This is a theory paper and review. To help clarify the emotional labor issues service employees confront, we explicate a model of emotional labor based on the attributes of jobs, roles, and professionalism. Findings: We define emotional labor as service work that exposes those who do such work to interactions with others that can arouse negative emotions. We propose that, while employing organizations define their jobs and employees craft their larger roles, professional norms and values also are a foundation for their emotional labor. Research Implications: We integrate this work-focused emotional labor model into the larger context in which such work occurs via theory and research on organizational climate. We suggest future research on this approach to understanding the antecedents and consequences of emotional labor work. We summarize the major research ideas of what should be the focus of such research and provide a hint about what an emotional labor climate scale might look like based on these ideas. Practical Implications: This chapter offers practical advice to HR managers about how to improve emotional labor. Social Implications: Better management of emotional labor can reduce employee stress and increase employee well-being. Originality/Value: This chapter develops an original model of emotional labor.

The existing research on service climate emphasizes its benefits for customers, employees and organizational outcomes. Service climate translates into organizational expectations from service employees to continuously show appropriate emotions when engaging with clients. However, these expectations may also take a toll on employees, who need to regulate their emotions using emotional labor strategies in order to conform to the organization’s expectations. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between the service climate and employees’ use of emotional labor strategies, and investigate how service employees’ service knowledge, skills, abilities and other attributes (KSAOs) affect this relationship.

In two separate studies, one with a sample including 100 nurses working in 15 wards, and the other comprised of 244 luxury hotel chain employees working in 39 departments, participants were surveyed about their perceptions of the service climate and their use of emotional labor strategies. In addition, each participant’s direct manager assessed his/her service KSAOs.

Results demonstrated a positive association between the service climate and the use of surface emotional labor strategies for employees who had limited service KSAOs.

Organizations may choose to hire service employees based on their service-related KSAOs and develop training and development programs for those who have fewer capabilities in these areas. In addition, organizations may want to rethink the traditional climate-induced emotional display rules and emphasize instead more authentic service encounters in order to lessen the toll that service climate takes on certain employees.

While service climate depicts the core values and beliefs of the organization about service, and helps employees to translate them into behaviors that promote high service performance, the current paper points to a potential toll it may have on employees well-being due to their use of surface emotional labor strategies.

Stress issues are a major concern for public organisations, especially in law enforcement. Organisational context is to blame for high levels of stress and low performance. Thus, the purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the authors aim to understand how one contextual variable – organisational stressors that emanate from the police station’s characteristics – affect organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). The second research aim is to assess how promoting trust in the police station can help mitigate the negative effects of these stressors. Based on the job demands – resources framework, the model posits that organisational stressors initiate a health-impairment process through an emotional-exhaustion climate, that can ultimately damage collective OCBs. The authors also propose that fostering a trust climate, as job resource, buffer the undesirable and negative impact of organisational stressors on exhaustion climate and collective OCB.

The paper opted for a quantitative study. Based on a sample of 718 police officers from 70 French Police stations, the authors follow the procedure outlined by Preacher (2013) to test the moderated-mediation model.

The study show that organisational stressors initiate a health-impairment process through an emotional-exhaustion climate, that can ultimately damage collective OCBs. The authors also demonstrate that fostering a trust climate, as job resource, will not decrease negative effects of organisational stressors but only contained them. Low-trust climate and moderate trust climate will, on the contrary, amplified the negative effects of these organisational stressors.

This paper fulfils an identified need to study stressors-strain-performance relationship at the collective level in a large sample of police officers. The paper includes implications for the development of interventions at the collective level.

This paper introduces the concept of the emotional climate of the workplace and explores how it both shapes and is shaped by the emotions experienced, expressed and redefined by nurses. It extracts emotional aspects of an organizational climate framework developed by Litwin and Stringer and examines these with respect to nurse’s experiences. The primary research was carried out at a general hospital NHS Trust in the East Midlands of the UK using a grounded theory methodology. The research methods included semi‐structured interviews and observation. The themes identified include many of those found by Litwin and Stringer, others which represent variations upon these, and a new set, which, when combined, identify the emotional climate of the organization. The findings have confirmed that the “experiment” of using a 33‐year‐old positivistic framework to investigate aspects of qualitative research has enabled a robust contribution to the conceptual area of emotional climate.

The purpose of this paper is to accelerate research related to the employee-facets of service management by summarizing current developments in multiple research streams, providing propositions, and articulating new directions for theory and empirical inquiry.

Seven scholars provide short reviews of the core topics and findings from four employee-related research streams – collective turnover, service climate, emotional labor, and occupational stress; and generate propositions to guide future theoretical and empirical work. Four distinguished service scholars – David Bowen, Ray Fisk, Christian Grönroos, and Jochen Wirtz comment upon these research streams and provide future directions for accelerating employee-related research in service management.

All four research-streams yield insights that have the potential to advance service management research. Commentaries from the distinguished scholars further integrate this work with key concerns within service management including technology-enablement, transformative services, and service strategy.

This paper is unique in its scope of coverage of management topics related to service and its aim to promote interdisciplinary dialog between service management scholars and researchers conducting employee-related research relevant to services.

This study investigates the role of personal resource (i.e. psychological empowerment) in reducing the negative impact of emotional exhaustion of frontline employees on their engagement. It also examines the moderating effects of ethical climate and transformational leadership in mitigating the negative influence of emotional exhaustion on engagement among frontline service employees (FLEs).

Data were collected from 671 frontline employees from financial services sector. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and hierarchical regression analysis (HRA) were used to test the hypothesized relationships.

Results show that the impact of emotional exhaustion on employee engagement is greatly affected by psychological empowerment. Transformational leadership moderates the negative effects of emotional exhaustion on psychological empowerment, while ethical climate weakens the negative impact of emotional exhaustion on employee engagement.

Service firms need to provide enough autonomy to emotionally exhausted frontline employees so that they feel valued. The emotionally exhausted employees can be engaged if they are empowered to discharge their job most effectively and a climate is ensured which can keep them motivated toward accomplishing their targets. A fair and just treatment shall boost their morale to perform better and to strengthen their staying intentions.

The novelty of our study lies in examining and fostering engagement among emotionally exhausted FLEs. It shows that job resources at the individual level (i.e. psychological empowerment), team level (i.e. transformational leadership) and organizational level (i.e. ethical climate) can help in encouraging work engagement among emotionally exhausted FLEs.

The caring leadership of principals is viewed as a professional method for utilizing emotional capital. The present study investigated the moderating relationship of caring leadership with the associations between emotional geographies, emotional distance and school climate.

Data from a cross-sectional survey of 305 Israeli teachers working in public schools were used to investigate a model of moderated mediation.

Caring leadership of principals moderates the association of emotional distance with school climate and is related to mediated associations between emotional geographies and school climate.

This is the first study to combine Hargreaves' theory of emotional geographies of schools with principals' caring leadership, providing insight on the role of school leadership in bridging fundamental gaps between key actors and treating crippling emotional dynamics.