The theme to this volume, “Emotions and organizational governance,” originates in the theme to the 2015 meetings Academy of Management (“opening Governance”), where the Organizing Committee (McGahan, 2015) noted on the conference website that, “The term ‘governance’ refers to leadership systems, managerial control protocols, property rights, decision rights, and other practices that give organizations their authority and mandates for action.” This conference theme was adopted in conjunction with a “Special Forum” issue of the Academy of Management Journal (see Tihanyi, Graffin, & George, 2014) and a “Symposium” section in the Academy of Management Perspectives (see Filatotchev & Nakajima, 2014). The overarching message here is that organizational governance is critically tied to the idea of organizational accountability and legitimacy (Huse, 2005).
Traditionally, and as can be seen in the Academy Theme, organizational governance is viewed as a largely procedural phenomenon and therefore essentially immune to the vagaries of human emotion. The chapters in this volume make it abundantly clear, however, that nothing could be further from the truth. As we pointed out in the introduction to Volume 10 in this series (Ashkanasy, Zerbe, & Härtel, 2014), emotions is a part of the very fabric of organizations. As such, their governance is also subject to all the vicissitudes and frailties that humans are capable of, including employee mistreatment and harm. If this is the case, then omitting to mention the role of emotions results in an incomplete picture of organizational governance.
Consistent with the idea that emotion plays a role at all levels of organizational analysis (Ashkanasy, 2003), the chapters in this volume address both positive and negative emotions in organizational governance at micro- and macro-levels of organization. Reflecting this, the volume is structured into three sections: Section I: Governance at the Micro-Level: How Supervisors Treat their Subordinates; Section II: Governance at the Macro-Level: Change and Sustainability; Section III: When Governance Goes Wrong: Fear and Bullying at Work.
Similar to Volume 11 in this series, the chapters in this volume are drawn from the best contributions to the 2014 International Conference on Emotion and Organizational Life, which was held at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. (This biannual conference has come to be known as the “Emonet” conference, after the listserv of members.) The peer-refereed conference papers were complemented by additional, invited chapters. This volume contains eight chapters selected from the conference program on the basis of their quality, interest, and appropriateness to the theme of this volume; as well as four invited chapters, including three that were presented at the annual meetings of the Academy of Management conducted in Vancouver, BC, in August 2015 and themed around the idea of “Opening Governance.” As usual, we acknowledge the assistance received from our Emonet conference paper reviewers as well as the “friendly reviewers” who looked at the invited submissions (see the List of Reviewers). In Volume 11 in this series, the chapters were focused on methods and in particular showcased “new ways to study emotion in organizations.” In the present volume, by contrast, chapters are focused on more contentive issues, focusing in particular on issues related to organizational governance.
In 2016, the Emonet conference will be held in Rome, Italy, immediately prior to the 2016 EGOS (European Group on Organization Studies), which is scheduled to be held in Naples. Readers interested in learning more about the conferences or the Emonet list should check the Emonet website http://www.emotionsnet.org, where they will find the conference program and paper abstracts.
Section I of this volume includes five chapters that deal with the way supervisors treat their immediate reports, and the effects such treatment (be it positive or negative) has on the subordinates and the organization. As such, the chapters can be characterized as a micro-level view of organizational governance, demonstrating how compassionate versus abusive supervisory practices can impact individual organizational members and ultimately governance across the organization as a whole.
In the opening chapter to this volume, authors Ashley O’Donoghue, Edel Conway, and Janine Bosak describe a field survey study where they asked 111 respondents to complete a number of instruments relating to their job satisfaction and well-being at work and to report on their supervisor’s abusive behavior (see Tepper, 2000). The authors also asked their respondents to complete a measure of core self-evaluation (CSE: Judge, Erez, Bono, & Thoresen, 2003). O’Dongohue and her associates hypothesized and found that perceived abusive supervision was related to reduced employee well-being (satisfaction and engagement) and increased ill-being (burnout), but that these effects were buffered by CSE. These results suggest that the effects on well- and ill-being are not just derived from the supervisor’s behavior toward subordinates but depend also on the personal characteristics of the subordinates themselves. The implication of this finding for organizational governance is that management needs to pay attention not only to ensuring that supervisors take care not to abuse their subordinates but that they also need to address means to make their employees more resilient to such behavior on the behalf of their superiors.
The following chapter, by Annilee M. Game, Michael A. West, and Geoff Thomas, addresses a similar issue: How can leaders most effectively deal with their followers’ negative experiences at work? Based on affective events theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996) and leader attachment theory (Game, 2011), the authors set out to examine if followers’ leader attachment (secure vs. anxious or avoidant) affects the way they respond to their leader’s caregiving following experience of negative affective events. Game and her team report on the results of interviewing secure and insecure followers and find that this does indeed affect their perceptions of their leader’s caregiving. These results highlight the need for leaders to understand their followers’ different perspectives if they are to function as effective and caring leaders. This finding effectively builds upon the results reported in Chapter 1 and highlights the point that governance at the level of individual leader-follower relationships is a two-way process.
The focus of Chapter 3, by Thomas Lechat and Olivier Torrès, shifts to the experience of negative affect in entrepreneurial business activity. The authors set out to categorize and then to rank the negative events experiences by a panel of 357 French entrepreneurial owners of small to medium business enterprises (SMEs), and to examine their effects on the entrepreneurs’ stress levels. They used a mixed (qualitative and quantitative) design that involved collection of 10 sets of interview data at regular intervals over a period of 21 months to identify and to rank (in terms of frequency and intensity) a list of 30 types of negative event experiences by SME entrepreneurs. Lechat and Torrès found that, while bankruptcy and financial problems were at the top of the list in terms of intensity, issues with employees seemed to occur most frequently. Notably, they found that financial problems were the most frequently cited source of intense negative emotions and consequent stress levels. Unsurprisingly, the entrepreneurs interviewed for the study also reported that overwork was most frequently associated with burnout. From a governance perspective, this chapter implies that account needs to be taken, not only for the behavior and personalities of people in organizations but also for the nature (frequency of occurrence and intensity) of the negative events themselves.
In Chapter 4, authors Cynthia Kivland and James P. Liautaud outline a study that results from a collaboration of three Chicago universities and ten corporate partners who were trained a method called “Process Designed Methodology” (PTD). The aim of the project was to see if leader PTD training in emotional and social competency (ESC) would be reflected in increased employee engagement (cf. Chapter 1). The authors recruited and trained a team of doctoral students in the PTD method who then provided the ESC training to managers in the partner firms. They found that the PTD training increased leader’s self-reported ESC by 8.21% and, more importantly, that this then results in a 5.62% increase in the leader’s employees’ self-reported employee engagement. The results of this study further reinforce the notion that a leader’s emotional competency is critical if positive employee outcomes are to be realized.
The final chapter of this section (Chapter 5), authored by Erin M. Richard, Christa P. Bupp, and Raad G. Alzaidalsharief, shifts the focus to the employee-customer interface, examining how supervisor support and empathy helps service employees to deal with disrespectful and angry customer behavior. Using survey results obtained from an Amazon.com “MTurk” sample of 214 participants, mostly reporting from the United States and India, the authors found that supervisor empathy rather than supervisor support buffered employees’ responses to customer anger. Based on these results, they conclude that “selecting and training managers who show empathy may improve customer service by resulting in more resilient employees.” This conclusion underscores the consistent funding across all the chapters in this section, namely that managers need to be responsive to the emotional needs of their employees.
Shifting to a macro-level perspective, the five chapters in Section II concern governance at the macro-level and include shared themes related both to the concepts studied, such as corporate responsibility and the leadership of change, and to the way that they are studied, notably multi-level approaches.
Section II opens with Chapter 6, by Christophe Haag and Isaac Getz, who examine emotions and change at the interpersonal level. Based on case studies and interviews with CEOs of large corporations and members of boards,1 the authors develop a model of how emotional sense-making and contagion can improve decision making by influencing others toward a desired sense or feeling toward a particular event. This model has four phases: The first phase acknowledges that affective events give rise to emotions among the CEO and others. The second recognizes that the emotional intelligence of the CEO will affect the CEO’s reaction. The third phase captures the verbal expression by the CEO and the fourth summarizes the emotional contagion which occurs when CEOs are able to impact others’ emotional states. Specifically, they posit that a homogenizing effect will improve group decision making. Finally, Haag and Getz draw implications for the selection, development, and actions of CEOs.
In the following chapter (Chapter 7), Gerald F. Burch, Andrew A. Bennett, Ronald H. Humphrey, John H. Batchelor, and Athena H. Cairo apply a multi-level analysis to the conceptualization of empathy in organizational research. Using Ashkanasy’s (2003) five-levels of analysis in emotions research, Burch and Humphrey develop propositions at the within-person, between-persons, interpersonal, team and organizational levels that describe the antecedents, moderators, and consequences of empathy. By considering the level of analysis, the authors help unpack, explain, and reconcile differences in definitions and conceptions of empathy. Moreover the proposition identified in Chapter 7 represent rich opportunities for theory testing and further theory development, as well as for important contributions to our understanding of how empathy is related to constructs ranging from self-regulation to individual differences to social position to leadership and organizational climate.
In Chapter 8, Jessica M. Blomfield, Ashlea C. Troth, and Peter J. Jordan examine the role of emotional thresholds in contributing to the success of change Blomfield agents in the context of corporate sustainability. Corporate efforts to promote sustainability are a rich arena for such investigation because of the greater likelihood of emotional reactions in such a value laden context. Extending previous research into the interpersonal arena, the Blomfield and her coauthors assert that the reactions and interpretations of organizational members to the emotional displays of change agents will influence change agent success. Drawing on the Dual Threshold Model (DTM: Geddes & Callister, 2007), the chapter authors posit that perceptions of change agents will depend on the level of organizational support for sustainability and the perceived intensity of emotional expression. Change agents who meet an appropriateness and salience threshold for emotional expression will be perceived as “passionate champions” when organizational support is high or as “rational conformists” if support is low. When emotional expression exceeds a threshold for appropriateness in intensity the change agent will be perceived as a “crazy greenie,” or if it does not meet a threshold for emotional expression, as an “insincere imposter.” Change agent success in these latter two situations will again depend on the level of organizational support but will be lower than when emotions are perceived as appropriate. Through their model, the authors provide both a valuable context-specific demonstration of the value of the DTM and helpful practical advice for agents promoting green initiatives in organizations.
The focus shifts to corporate social responsibility (CSR) in Chapter 9, where authors Henri Kuokkanen and William Sun seek to uncover the reason why CSR has a weak relationship with corporate financial performance. Kuokkanen and Sun posit that the combined effects of social desirability bias and cynicism (consumer skepticism about the underlying motives of a firm) can diminish the relationship between CSR and firm performance. The authors also advocate for the use of hybrid choice modeling (Ben-Akiva & Walker, 2002; Walker, 2001) as a framework for implementing latent variables in choice models. The authors posit that the inclusion of latent variables and the use of structural equation modeling will enhance the ability of consumer-oriented CSR surveys to show valid relationships between CSR and performance, increasing the value of such research.
Pamala J. Dillon and Charles C. Manz also take a multi-level approach in Chapter 10, where they use social identity theory to explore the role of emotions in transformational leadership. In an interesting parallel to the chapter in this section by Haag and Getz (Chapter 6) and Blomfield, Troth and Jordan (Chapter 8), Dillon and Manz posit that transformational leaders respond to emotion-laden events, such as crises, by engaging the social identities of followers to create desired follower emotions and outcomes. The specific crisis context Dillon and Manz consider is that of responses to ethical lapses and corporate social irresponsibility. In this situation, leaders are called on to transform organizational identities toward greater social responsibility. The authors posit that effective transformational leaders use interpersonal emotional management strategies, such as idealized influence, to affect followers, and will do so in different ways before and after the emotional responses of followers. Further, how followers respond will be influenced by their self-concept and social identity. Followers may thus experience very different discreet emotions, such as pride, guilt, and shame, as a consequence of this self-evaluation. Skillful transformational leaders, in turn, respond differentially to these follower emotions in order to align the goals of followers with those of the organization and create responsible change.
Authors of the chapters in the final part of this volume deal specifically with the results of poor organizational governance. In essence, poorly governed organizations enter into a state of “lawlessness,” where legitimacy and regulations no longer function effectively to maintain order. The result is bullying and the emergence of a stat of fearfulness.
Section III opens with Chapter 11, where authors Laura Upenieks and William Magee note that little research to data has been devoted to understanding impulses that occur in organizational and work contexts. In particular, there have been no previous studies that have investigated supervisory level differences in workplace maliciousness. Upenieks and Magee therefore seek to probe the concept of “impulse” and its connection to other concepts and phenomena. They go about this by focusing on the impulse to harm a coworker, which is labeled maliciousness, and by focusing on the relation between hierarchical position at work, or supervisory level, and malicious impulses toward others at work. The study the authors outline utilized residents of the Greater Toronto Area, aged 18–70, who participated in telephone interviews conducted in late 2004 and early 2005 and who reported that they worked at least 20 hours per week in the month prior to their interview, excluding self-employed with no subordinates. The results of the study suggest that middle-level supervisors report more malicious intent than nonsupervisory workers. The results also indicate that the flow of maliciousness in the workplace tends to occur more from the middle down than in a uniform top-down or bottom-up direction. The findings of the study add to the growing literature on the uniqueness of middle-level supervisory position in the occupational hierarchy. It also adds to our understanding regarding the concept of impulse in relation to coworker harm and that maliciousness (independently of anger and stress) is directed from the middle downward in the occupational hierarchy.
In the following chapter (Chapter 12), authors Amal Ahmadi, Bernd Vogel, and Claire Collins present an initial conceptual introduction of managers’ knowing-doing gap in leadership. They explore in particular how managers may transfer, to varying degrees in different situations, their leadership knowledge into leadership practice, thereby widening and bridging their leadership knowing-doing gaps at different points in time. Noting that interest in leadership development theory, research, and practice has grown considerably over the past three decades, the authors argue that understanding leadership development and building knowledge about leadership more often than not remains an end in itself in practice, with relatively little attention paid to the transfer of leadership learning into actual leadership practice. This initial theoretical framework addresses this issue and contributes to existing approaches to leadership development as well as emotions and leadership in at least three ways. First, the framework is one of the first scholarly attempts to uncover the gap between knowing leadership and enacting leadership. Second, the authors seek to add to the scarce literature on negative discrete emotions in the workplace, and the limited existing literature that links fear with leadership. Third, they offer an initial theoretical framework in which both fear and leadership are multidimensional, dynamic, and context-specific. As such, the theory has implications for future research to enhance our understanding of the topic, and contributes toward existing approaches on leadership development as well as emotions and leadership.
In Chapter 13, Marissa S. Edwards, Sandra A. Lawrence, and Neal M. Ashkanasy present an alternative to traditional studies of employee silence, and describe how they employed a modified form of grounded theory to analyze transcripts of an inquiry into the events that took place between March 2003 and February 2005 at Bundaberg Base Hospital, a regional health center in the State of Queensland, Australia. Adverse events occur frequently in healthcare settings and (as this case illustrates) can lead to serious consequences for patients, employees, and organizations alike. For over three decades, researchers have sought to identify factors influencing employees’ responses to wrongdoing in work settings, including organizational, contextual, and individual factors. To address this imperative, Edwards and her colleagues provide a systematic and detailed analysis of the adverse events that transpired at this hospital. The aim of their research was to explore how employees responded to a series of adverse events in a healthcare setting, identifying some key organizational and contextual variables shaping perceptions and responses. The results revealed that employees observed multiple and severe concerning incidents over a considerable period of time, many of which were ambiguous and difficult to define as genuine issues for concern. The results also indicate strongly that employees’ perceptions, appraisals, and emotions shaped their decisions about how to respond to these events. Overall, the results indicate that employees can respond to adverse events in a range of ways and suggest that employees use a number of options before progressing to external whistle-blowing. This chapter extends previous work by explicating the relationship between specific organizational and contextual factors and key perceptions to explain employee silence. More broadly, the results extend theoretical concepts proposed in the management sciences literature thus far, including a climate of silence and quiescent and acquiescent silence.
In Chapter 14, authors Riitta Hekkala and Mari-Klara Stein examine “emotionologies,” which represent the attitudes that employees hold toward emotions and their appropriate expression and regulation in the context of project management. As such, Hekkala and Stein address the fact that, while emotion has become an increasingly popular topic in organization studies, and despite emotions having been identified as an important topic, the concept of emotion continues to be elusive. To investigate the kinds of emotionologies present in this inter-organizational information systems (IOIS) development project and similar to the authors of Chapter 13, they chose to employ a qualitative case study. The data consists of 41 qualitative interviews which were collected in two phases. The findings show how the feelings and emotions (displayed feelings) of project members developed as the work on system development progressed from largely positive feelings in the beginning to more negative feelings midway through the project. Overall, the authors argue that group emotionologies, with their professional, organizational, and social emotion rules, interact with personal emotion rules, resulting in interesting emotion regulation strategies that often try to minimize emotional dissonance, sometimes at the expense of risking open conflict among project members. In sum, this study makes several contributions. First, Hekkala and Stein identify and describe different patterns of changing feelings and emotions, and emotionologies among the various sub-groups working in the IS project. Second, in order to understand emotionologies in a more systematic manner, the authors suggest the adoption of the concept of emotion structure, consisting of emotion rules and resources, which will help scholars to understand both the attitudes and standards of a group toward emotions and their expression (emotion rules) as well as the influence of these attitudes and standards on allocative and authoritative emotion regulation. Third, the authors distinguish between external, internalized, and internal emotion rules, which may emanate from the profession, organization, society, and personal principles.
In the final chapter to this volume (Chapter 15), authors Premilla D’Cruz and Ernesto Noronha explicitly address the theme of this volume: organizational governance. They propose in particular that organizational governance, through international, national, and company codes, serves as an appropriate means to deal with varieties of workplace bullying. To accomplish this, D’Cruz and Noronha conducted a review of two literatures: (a) workplace bullying, differentiated on the basis of its situatedness and level into internal bullying – of an interpersonal and depersonalized nature – and external bullying; and (b) organizational governance, including its theoretical perspectives, especially the societal lens, and international, national, and firm codes. In so doing, the authors sought to make two main contributions: First, despite the clear relevance of organizational governance to workplace bullying, the prospect of interventions from this standpoint has never been previously explored. Second, the term “varieties of workplace bullying” is propounded to capture the different types of emotional abuse at work known so far. This is an important contribution insofar as workplace bullying is increasingly recognized as a growing problem across the globe particularly because of the competitiveness of the neo-liberal context. World-wide, all types of this misbehavior, including interpersonal and depersonalized bullying within organizations and customer abuse from outside, constitute unethical and unacceptable behavior, which takes away from employee rights and diminishes employee well-being, compromising respectful and dignified workplaces.
In conclusion, the chapters in this volume all serve to illustrate how emotions are critical across all levels of organizational management and governance, focusing more on the core roles played by emotions rather than on highlighting methodological advances as was done in Volume 11 in this series. Taken together, the two volumes that emerged from the 2014 Emonet conference provide an up to-do-date compendium of some of the latest research on the role played by emotion in organizations, including the use of new methodologies (Chapter 11) and identification of emotion as a kay factor in organizational governance.
Neal M. Ashkanasy
Charmine E. J. Härtel
Wilfred J. Zerbe
1. Note that, while Haag and Getz refer in this chapter to decisions made by CEOs in concert with their “boards,” it is evident in their discussion that “boards” also include committees comprising the senior leadership that reports to the CEO.
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