Emotions During Times of Disruption: Volume 18

In this introductory chapter, we establish the basis for the theme of this volume, “Emotions and Disruption.” We discuss how the initial idea for the theme arose during the height of COVID-19. At this time, and as widely reported in the press (e.g., see Grensing-Pophal, 2020), a myriad of workplace disruptions occurred impacting employees' moods and emotions and their subsequent well-being and performance. We open by discussing some key work on emotions research during change and disturbance, followed by a synopsis of each of the chapters in this volume, including discussion of their key contributions. This includes an overview of how some of these chapters were first presented as conference papers at the Twelfth International Conference on Emotions and Worklife (EMONET XII), an event that took place for the first time online in response to the turbulence and travel disruptions created by the pandemic.

In this chapter we give an outline of the organization of this book and discuss its four major parts. We then relate each chapter to the relevant part and consider its key contributions in terms of what we have learnt about emotions when applying the lens of disruption.

We conclude that the chapters provide a range of insights and practical solutions for dealing with emotions during different types of disruption that should be helpful to practitioners and academics.

The chapters investigate underresearched topics and thus make new and important contributions. While many topics addressed in the chapters are still in their initial stages, they clearly have the potential to make a significant impact on people's work lives.

Rarely is emotional labor explicitly discussed as a required aspect of crisis response work. While the gender inequities in withdrawal from the workforce emerging from the pandemic are well documented, we know little about the emotional toll of managing the ongoing disruption of the pandemic for women with different degrees of membership in organizations.

This research uses a dynamic mixed-methods approach in studying emotional labor among women during times of disruption. Specifically, we explore with surveys, daily diary entries, and semistructured interviews the emotional experiences of women working at a California-based nonprofit organization during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. With our data, we are able to compare the emotional expectations and experiences of full-time (FT) and part-time (PT) employees.

Results show differences in emotional experiences and labor by group membership, with FT employees reporting higher rates of surface acting: FT employees suppressed (28%) and inauthentically expressed (12%) emotions more often than PT employees (23% and 5%, respectively). Qualitative evidence suggests socialization is occurring more formally for FT employees and informally for PT employees, influencing perceived emotional expectations and subsequent emotional labor.

The contributions to this volume focus on an understudied topic in nonprofit management: emotional experiences in times of disruption. Novel evidence on differing emotional experiences, particularly surface acting, as a function of group membership may motivate other research to disentangle issues of change management during crises.

These differing rates of surface acting have meaningful implications for burnout and retention of employees in a sector that is heavily reliant on voluntary and PT engagement. Thus, this work serves to provide organizational leadership and management insight on mechanisms shaping employee outcomes.

The findings here have important implications for employee well-being and are crucial to the way individuals across society manage the stress of working during times of crisis.

PT work is subject to different emotional norms than FT work. These novel findings provide value to organizational leaders who oversee a workforce with varying degrees of group membership.

This study employs the concept of emotional ambivalence, in an exploration of the complex emotions experienced by organizational members during organizational change.

The study entailed 37 in-depth interviews conducted in two English housing associations. The interview transcripts, as well as organizational documents and research fieldnotes were subject to thematic and narrative analysis.

The emotions experienced by organizational members during organizational change are inherently ambivalent.

Results show that engaging with organizational members who experience ambivalent emotions in response to change offers an important resource which can be utilized by change managers.

I aim to understand how informal relationships at work provide a supportive context for individuals and contribute to their engagement in an environment of disruptive change when they are likely to be stressed.

The research was conducted in three UK public service organizations during pre-Brexit disruption. An app was used to capture 400+ transient emotions, reactions, and diary entries of employees about their interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues. This was followed by 25 interviews to reflect more deeply on those relationships documented in the app.

Interactions with co-workers, colleagues, and close colleagues are shown to contribute in different ways to emotions felt and different aspects of engagement. Closer relationships, less transactional and more emotional in nature, contribute to feelings of trust, significance, and mutual reliance. A typology of four close colleague relationship types also emerged variously driven by the depth of the relationship and sense of shared mutuality.

This research documents employees' lived experience during disruption to show that relationships provide support for the meaningfulness, psychological safety, and availability aspects of personal engagement. It maps the process of developing supportive workplace relationships that form the relational context with four sub-contexts, distinguishing work, and personal engagement by their different foci. Practical and social implications are discussed.

We test a multilevel exploratory predictive model, examining the relationships between emotional labor (EL) and workers' affectivity traits at a philanthropic hospital, where EL involves a process of emotional regulation at work involving emotional display rules, regulatory strategies, and emotional performance. Specifically, we test a model of the mediation effects of regulatory strategies and the moderation effects of emotional demands.

Participants were 306 workers from 45 different units of a hospital institution, whose performance was evaluated by 30 supervisors. Since workers' emotional display rules could not be represented as shared, unit-level beliefs, we chose two critical demands to test our hypotheses: (1) demand to express compassion and (2) demand to conceal anger or disapproval.

Using multilevel analysis, we found evidence that deep acting mediates between emotional demands to express compassion and emotional performance. We found further that demands to conceal anger toward coworkers increase the strength of the relationship between negative affectivity and surface acting.

Theoretical and practical implications of the study are also discussed.

The working day has always comprised frequent interruptions. Yet the frequency and intensity of these disruptions appear to be on the rise as a result of advancing technology, increasing interdependent work processes, and changing work environments (e.g., open-plan offices). Interestingly, there have only been a handful of studies on workplace interruptions, and the primary focus among researchers has been on the effects of interruptions on task completion. In this chapter, we argue that interruptions at work can be conceptualized as emotion-inducing events. We draw on research across different disciplines to develop a framework to show how the work-enhancing or work-hindering effects of different types of interruptions are, in part, determined by the employees' capability to manage (regulate) their emotional responses.

We initially review the literature regarding workplace interruptions. We then develop a framework for understanding the different types of interruptions experienced by individuals at work and then use this framework to develop a model linking interruptions to emotion regulation drawing on Affective Events Theory (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). In essence, we advance our understanding of work interruptions by considering these as events that are able to produce positive or negative affective reactions that may enhance or hinder work performance.

The framework presented in this chapter increases understanding of the different types of workplace interruptions and shows how emotion regulation impacts subsequent work-related outcomes. This chapter provides valuable insights into the nature of work interruptions to identify both positive and negative aspects of work interruptions to establish two different domains of work interruptions that may improve (work-enhancing interruptions) or thwart (work-hindering interruptions) work-related outcomes. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Allocation of individuals' resources among multiple goals is an increasingly prominent theoretical and practical issue. Despite several theoretical perspectives that highlight the potential role of affect in this resource allocation process, empirical work on the topic is quite limited with little focus on the activation dimension of affect. This study aimed to provide further insight into this issue.

The current research explored the role of the activation dimension of affect in a multiple-goal environment. Specifically, 118 individuals participated in a 21-day longitudinal study in which they reported on affect and resource allocation related to two real-life goals.

Multilevel-modeling analyses indicated that activation positively relates to allocation of resources (effort, intended effort, and intended time devoted to a goal). The results also illustrate that task-related negative valence is a significant predictor for two of the three indicators of resource allocation (intended effort was the exception).

This research informs theory and practice at the intersection of emotion and work motivation by investigating a relatively understudied dimension of affect and provides results that help clarify the role of affect during the pursuit of multiple, competing goals.

Teams in extreme and disruptive contexts face unique challenges that can undermine coordination and decision-making. In this study, we evaluated how affective differences between team members and team process norms affected the team's decision-making effectiveness.

Teams were placed in a survival simulation where they evaluated how best to maximize the team's survival prospects given scarce resources. We incorporated multisource and multirater (i.e., team, observer, and archival) data to ascertain the impacts of affect asymmetry and team process norms on decision-making effectiveness.

Results suggest that teams with low positive affect asymmetry and low process norms generate the most effective decisions. The least effective team decision performance occurred in teams characterized by high variance in team positive affectivity (high positive affect asymmetry) and low process norms. We found no similar effect for teams with high process norms and no effect for negative affect asymmetry, however, irrespective of team process norms.

These findings support the affect infusion model and extend cognitive resource theory, by highlighting how affect infusion processes and situational constraints influence team decision-making in extreme and disruptive contexts.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of emotional intelligence (EI) on the relationship between strategic management of technology (SMT) and organizational performance (OP).

Data were collected through a survey of 1,094 managerial level employees attached to banks in Sri Lanka and analyzed using structural equation modeling procedure with SmartPLS to test a priori-based conceptual model. The results supported the arguments on the positive impact of SMT on OP, and the moderating role of EI on the relationship between SMT and the OP.

This research reveals the positive effect of SMT on organizational performance.

The findings imply the importance of emotions of managerial level employees in implementing technology strategies to enhance organizational performance in highly volatile markets.

The findings provide an important contribution to the practitioners with the importance of EI for the relationship between SMT and OP.

To date, research focus has been on overt forms of abusive supervision, like aggressive behavior and physical violence. Less clear is the effect of implicit abusive supervisory behaviors such as gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation whereby a “gaslighter” seeks to confuse, disorientate, and cast doubt in the mind of a victim. In this study, we aim to examine the effects of supervisory gaslighting on employee's affective organizational commitment (AOC). We also investigate the mediating role of leader-member exchange (LMX) on this relationship and whether employee emotional intelligence (EI) buffers the negative effects of supervisory abuse.

Two hundred and sixty-six participants were allocated to one of three conditions (high, medium, and none) where they read workplace scenarios varying in the level of supervisory gaslighting. Afterward, participants responded to AOC, LMX, and EI scales.

Results showed supervisory gaslighting decreases employee AOC and that this relationship is partly explained by the employee's relationship with their supervisor. Contrary to expectations, higher employee EI strengthened the effect of gaslighting on AOC.

Supervisory gaslighting remains largely unexplored and this chapter contributes to this topic by testing a model to understand the effects of gaslighting on AOC. These findings provide a solid foundation for further research in this area.

Organizational change is endemic and can be disruptive for leaders' emotions and subsequent behaviors. While many studies focus on employees' reactions to change, there are few that focus on leader responses to change. The focus of our study is on leaders. In this chapter, we outline a qualitative study examining a leader's emotion regulation during organizational change. The aim of our research is to better understand the emotions leaders experience during organizational change and what emotion regulation strategies they enact to support positive outcomes.

Data were collected through interviews with 25 middle and senior management who were involved in organizational change at the time of interviews. The day reconstruction method was used to evoke and more accurately capture leaders' memories of an emerging or actual change event, the emotions they experienced, and the emotional regulation strategies utilized. Conceptualizing the change as a disruptive affective event, we asked participants to recall scenarios related to the change that triggered an emotional response and drew on the process model of emotion regulation (Gross, 1998a) to interpret these data. To round off the interviews, we captured the leader's personal outcomes from the emotion regulation strategies enacted.

Based on the data, leaders managing organizational change processes described the experience as a series of disruptive affective events that were more often associated with experiences of negatively valanced emotions (compared to positive emotions). Further, leaders were most likely to respond to these affective disruptions with the specific emotion regulation strategy of suppression (i.e., masking negative feelings with neutral or positive affective displays). A major reason leaders report responding with suppression is to maintain their professionalism, even if this undermines their health and well-being.

Qualitative research seeking to understand a leader's emotion experiences during organizational change is rare. These findings provide a more nuanced understanding of the affective nature of leaders' experiences and responses when managing the disruptive processes of change. This knowledge can assist organizations to develop processes and tools to support leaders dealing with the emotional realities of change to enable better outcomes for themselves and their followers.

This chapter looks into unpleasant affective states, or rather “dreaded emotions,” in leadership. Specifically, the adaptive roles and functions of fear, anger, and sadness are reviewed and discussed in a leadership context.

The social functions of fear, anger, and sadness are first presented. Following each emotion, the target of emotional expression – both other-directed (i.e., targeting followers and/or emotion-eliciting events) and self-directed (i.e., targeting leader) – is further discussed.

A symmetrical assumption has emerged over recent years that positive emotions result in positive outcomes and negative emotions lead to negative outcomes. In practice, the realities of organizational life and leader–follower interactions do not reflect such a neat juxtaposition. Positively valenced emotions can yield negative outcomes, and negatively valenced emotions can bring about positive outcomes.

Unpleasant emotions – fear and sadness, in particular – remain understudied in organizational and leadership literature, even though leaders experience these emotions just like the rest of us. This review offers ideas, through the combination of psychological and leadership research, on how social functions of dreaded emotions, including fear, anger, and sadness, can yield desirable leadership outcomes.

This chapter provides a review on unpleasant emotions (i.e., fear, anger, and sadness) that are rarely discussed and underresearched in leadership literature.

This chapter reviews some of the learnings and solutions suggested by the chapter authors regarding the role of emotions during disruption and offers ideas for future research. The aim is to offer a positive conclusion to the problems (and opportunities) of disruption.

The learnings are arranged under four headings: (1) The heightened salience and complexity of emotions and emotional processes during disruption; (2) The upside of disruption if emotions are managed effectively: performance and other outcomes; (3) The importance of working relationships for emotions during disruption; and (4) The critical role of leader emotional competencies and responses during disruption.

The challenges posed by various forms of disruption, and the emotions they engender, can lead to positive outcomes if managed appropriately.

The contributions in this book highlight a broad range of important but under researched topics regarding various forms of organizational disruption, emotions, and emotional processes. Chapter authors also offer many solutions for dealing with the challenges associated with these issues that might prove helpful in today's organizations.

The affect-related processes and outcomes examined in the chapters presented in this book have an impact on employee well-being and performance. As such, managing emotions appropriately and effectively is important for society.

The chapters in this book provide a variety of original perspectives and solutions on the role of emotions during the modern era of endemic disruption.