12 Emotions and Organizing

(Mumby and Putnam 1992)

bounded rationality was developed around patriarchal modes of organizing.

• Deconstruction benefits feminism:

  • “exposes the political nature of categories” (e.g., nature, and gender)

  • exposes oppressive system of hierarchy by challenging dichotomous thinking.

  • helps rethinking power and identity

• Bounded emotionality was created to challenge bounded rationality, but not to be its opposite.

• bounded rationality grounded in “satisficing”

• four premises of feminist view on bounded rationality:

  • the centrality of the cognitive metaphor

  • the emphasis on a mind-body dualism

  • the devaluing of physical labor

  • the treatment of emotion as a form a labor

• (Hochschild 2012) defined emotional labor as “the way individuals change or manage emotions to make them appropriate or consistent with a situation, a role or an expected organizational behavior.”

  • emotional labor becomes a commodity for organization to achieve its goal.

  • However, I disagree with this idea because people can be happier even when they fake smile.

• bounded emotionality is “an alternative mode of organizing in which nurturance, caring, community, supportiveness, and interrelatedness are fused with individual responsibility to shape organizational experience.”

• bounded emotionality also tries to reduce emotional labor and gendered divisions of labor (e.g., women can express work feeling).

After reading this piece, I was still not convinced that bounded rationality is rooted in patriarchy. Authors argued that since previous researchers are so embedded in the bureaucratization of organization that they don’t realize power-knowledge relationship.

(Kramer and Hess 2002)

Emotion management in organization:

• at the center is “professionalism”
• both positive and negative emotions, need to be display in appropriate ways
• the appropriate way of displaying negative emotions is masking them.
• using emotions to help others, not for oneself.

Emotions are typically understood in terms of expectancy violation

Organizations are indoctrinated to favor positive emotions.

(Rivera 2014)

Using the framework of emotional taint to understand dirty works (e.g., border patrol).

Sometimes dirty work does not exclusively relate to physical or danger activities but include those social taint (e.g., exotic dancers)

Emotional labor “includes outward performances of emotions” (e.g., smiling, yelling, showing no emotions) is socially constructed.

Sensemaking of identities, dirty work by using past works.

This line of work (e.g., law enforcement) prefers more masculine emotional labor (e.g., use of force continuum)

Stoicism is a form of emotional labor. Emotional labor is dirty work.

Criticism of feminine care work and compassion, which is parallel to men’s struggle with perception of sexuality when they act caring

Making sense of taint by expressing tensions:

• Agents are at the crossroad of society’s view of their work (e.g., positive and negative)
• They have to switch between 2 types of emotional labor (e.g., stoicism and compassion)

Emotional Taint Management:

• Strategically engage in different emotions

(Jia, Cheng, and Hale 2016)

• emotions are expressed through communication

• supervisor nonverbal immediacy influences subordinates’ emotional experience (e.g., emotion work, and perceived emotional support)

• Emotional response theory: people respond to external environmental stimuli (e.g., emotion inducing factor - nonverbal immediacy by supervisors).

• According to (Mehrabian 1967), nonverbal immediacy are “communicative behaviors used to enhance physical or psychological closeness and reduce interpersonal distance” (e.g., touching, nodding, smiling).

• (Titsworth, Quinlan, and Mazer 2010) defined three dimensions of student emotional experience in response to teacher communication:

  • Emotional valance: positive/negative reactions

  • Emotion work: intentional management of emotional expression, could lead to emotional exhaustion or burnout

  • Emotional support: perception of receiving emotional support

• “Supervisor NI will be positively correlated with subordinates’ perceptions of received emotional support from the supervisor”

• According to (RUBIN, PERSE, and BARBATO 1988), based on goal-oriented behaviors, there are six motives for interpersonal communication:

  • relationally oriented motives (used to facilitate positive encounters)

    • pleasure

    • affection

    • relaxation

    • inclusion

  • personal-influence motives (used to manage interaction)

    • escape

    • control

• Supervisor NI enhance employees’ received emotional support, and reduce employees’ engagement in emotion work