Emotions in Organizations: Drawing Connections to Social Capital and Employee Well-Being

Abstract

Employee emotions are essential to relationship building in organization and work settings, potentially improving or damaging relationships among employees, and between employees and clients. While there are several concepts used to study emotions, the concept most commonly discussed in academic literature with respect to work and organizations is emotional labor. Since its genesis in 1983, emotional labor has been used by scholars in several disciplines to explore questions of individual well-being and organizational effectiveness. This dissertation builds on previous scholarship to provide a nuanced understanding of emotions and explore how emotions influence intra-organization relationships and employee well-being by conducting three studies. The first study provides an initial examination of emotional labor and organization social capital using quantitative methods. The findings indicate employees perceiving themselves as more emotionally competent are likely to also perceive more connections among members of their organizations and high levels of identification with their organization. The second study relies on series of in-depth interviews with local government employees to explore how they regulate their emotions during interactions with coworkers. Here, the interviews suggest that professionalism acts as an organizational display rule, restricting the development of social capital. The final study conducts a meta-analysis that examines the relationship between commonly measured emotional labor strategies, the dimensions of burnout, and job satisfaction. The research findings suggest deep acting, a primary strategy of emotional labor, does not hold as notable of a relationship with individual well-being as surface acting and the expression of genuine emotion. The findings also indicate profession and culture act as important moderators when studying the influence of emotional labor on burnout and job satisfaction. I conclude with a summary of each study and a presentation of my future research agenda, before providing a discussion of how emotional labor scholars can provide research that is relevant to public administration scholarship and practice.