Individual emotion in work organizations

Abstract

We are predisposed to thinking of emotions as our own, perhaps the most intimate parts of ourselves. Yet, more often than not, our emotions are inextricably bound up with other people and social worlds, with one of the most powerful of those being the organizational work context. The central premise of this article is that much of our social and emotional life is organizational. We begin with a view to the past, describing how, because of a focus on control, both management and scholars attempted to tightly delineate the emotions that could legitimately be expressed and recognized in work settings. Such tight control could not hold emotions at bay, however. Managers and scholars have recognized that individual feelings are often expressions of or reactions to organizational realities. We review two waves of what we loosely call current organizational research that acknowledges emotion. The first wave attempts to explain individual emotion in organizational terms, while the second wave focuses on the idea of culture. Looking toward the future, we conclude that attempts to quell and ignore emotion in organizations are recognized as outdated. The emerging alternative appears to be to somehow “manage” the beast called emotion at work. We call for future research that recognizes employees', customers', shareholders', and suppliers' emotions in designing organizational features such as cultures, routines, structures, and patterns of leadership. Yet we note that as emotion is being more and more managed, people are feeling more and more alienated. The managed emotions of organized work can become very attractive to people as a place to escape to from the emotional hardships of home and community. We suggest future research and policy pay attention to a growing paradox in the future of emotion: that as emotion is more and more organizationally managed, the less it feels truly emotional.