Understanding the positive and negative effects of emotional expressions in organizations: EASI does it

an article by Gerben A van Kleef (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands) published in Human Relations Volume 67 Number 9 (September 2014)

Abstract

Emotions have a pervasive impact on organisational behaviour. They do not just influence people’s own actions; when expressed, emotions may also exert influence on other organisation members who perceive the expressions. Sometimes emotional expressions have ‘symmetrical’ effects, in that positive expressions yield advantageous outcomes for the expresser, while negative expressions produce disadvantageous outcomes.

In other cases effects are ‘asymmetrical’, such that negative emotional expressions generate beneficial outcomes for the expresser, while positive expressions produce detrimental outcomes.

Drawing on Emotions as Social Information (EASI) theory, I develop a theoretical analysis of when and how expressions of anger and happiness generate symmetrical versus asymmetrical effects. I support my analysis with a review of empirical research on the interpersonal effects of anger and happiness in negotiations and leadership.

This review permits two general conclusions:

1. symmetrical effects of anger and happiness are mediated by affective reactions of perceivers, whereas asymmetrical effects are mediated by inferential processes in perceivers;
2. the relative strength of affective reactions versus inferential processes (and thereby the likelihood of symmetrical versus asymmetrical effects) depends on the perceiver’s information processing motivation and ability and on the perceived appropriateness of the emotional display.

I discuss theoretical implications and future directions.

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Needs-Based Assessment: A Model for Profiling, Assisting, and Empowering Job Seekers

an article by Paul Englert (OPRA Group, Wellington, New Zealand), Marianne Doczi (New Zealand Employment Service and Work and Income New Zealand (Now at FutureNOW, Melbourne, Australia)) and Duncan J. R. Jackson (Assessment and Development Consultants (a&dc), Surrey, England (Now at Royal Docks Business School, University of East London, England)) published in Journal of Employment Counseling Volume 51 Issue 1 (March 2014)

Abstract

Needs-based assessment (NBA) was developed in New Zealand to assess job seekers’ capacity, willingness, and opportunity to find work. This article outlines the development of NBA from its theoretical underpinnings, evidence from a longitudinal study and the development of an employment adviser–administered computerized profiling tool, and the provision of self-assessment and support tools.

The authors argue that, with a rise in the number of unemployed job seekers and the long-term unemployed, demands for government resources with less resources available to satisfy those demands, and the widespread adoption of social and interactive media, it is timely to revisit an NBA approach to job seeker profiling and targeted intervention.

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How do occupational norms shape mothers’ career and caring options?

an article by Tanya Carney and Anne Junor (University of New South Wales, Australia) published in JIR: The Journal of Industrial Relations Volume 56 Nuber 4 (September 2014)

Abstract

Occupationally-differentiated patterns of paid work arrangements help shape the extent to which mothers of children under the age of 16 have access to both career and caring security (stable paid jobs with career prospects that also guarantee the ongoing capacity to provide and arrange high-quality care for children). Five sets of conditions critical to mothers’ work and caring security are:

• contracts providing two-way mobility between full-time and part-time work;
• actual hours worked;
• work scheduling; 
• work location; and 
• contractual security.

Occupations can be clustered into ‘shapes’, based on the relative mother-friendliness of different ways in which they combine these conditions. Some shapes provide both employment security and caring security; others involve types of flexibility focusing a trade-off between the two types of security.

Data for 64 occupations, taken from early waves of the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics of Australia (HILDA) Survey, were used to identify statistical norms for key aspects of each employment condition, and also the strength of these norms – that is, how flexible they were, for better or worse. These occupational norms and strengths were assumed to reflect regulatory standards or commonly accepted organisational practices. The 64 occupations could be grouped into five shapes that were associated with different concentrations of mothers.

Occupational ‘shapes’ may thus act as barriers or enablers to mothers’ labour market transitions. They may tend to exclude mothers by denying caring security; allow employment maintenance based on a trade between caring and career security; or enable full occupational integration by providing both forms of security.

The concept of shapes aids theoretical understanding of the mechanisms of occupational segregation and labour market segmentation, and may aid the targeting of regulatory interventions to improve mothers’ access to both career and caring security.

‘Why would you want to do that?’: Defining emotional dirty work

an article by Robert McMurray (Durham University, UK) and Jenna Ward (De Montfort University, UK) published in Human Relations Volume 68 Number 9 (September 2014)

Abstract

This article considers how and why people work with difficult emotions.

Extending Hughes’ typology of the physical, social and moral taints that constitute ‘dirty work’, the article explores the nature of a previously neglected and undefined concept, emotional dirt.

Drawing on data from a situated ethnographic study of Samaritans, we consider how the handling of difficult and burdensome emotions, which are often written out of rational accounts of work, is outsourced to others who act as society’s agents in the containment of emotional dirt. We provide the first explicit definition of emotional dirt, and contribute an extension to the existing tripartite classification of occupational taint.

Moreover, in naming emotional dirt we seek to open up a sphere of research dedicated to understanding its emergence, nature and relational effects. To this end, we demonstrate how taint emerges as a sociological consequence of the performance of emotional labour as emotional dirty work, while considering how management of the difficult, negative or out-of-place emotions of others can be framed as a positive experience such that it can be good to feel bad when handling emotional dirt.

Doing Borrowed Time: The State, the Law and the Coercive Governance of ‘Undeserving’ Debtors

an article by Adrienne Roberts (University of Manchester, UK) published in Critical Sociology Volume 40 Number 5 (September 2014)

Abstract

This paper documents the shift toward increasingly coercive means of collecting debt from working class and poor borrowers, with a specific focus on incarceration. Placing this trend within an historical trajectory, it is argued that the law has always been central to creating and securing the social relations of debt as class relations.

While the abolition of debtors’ prisons in the 19th century helped to shift struggles between debtors and creditors out of public view and into the depoliticized realm of ‘the law’, a number of factors have led to its reappearance in the contemporary era.

These include:

1. changes to bankruptcy legislation that have given creditors greater power over debtors, 
2. the emergence of the debt-buying industry and 
3. the growing privatization, decentralization and commercialization of the state, which have transformed it into a creditor that relies on its power to punish to compel payment from some of the poorest debtors.

When Religion Enters the Counseling Group: Multiculturalism, Group Processes, and Social Justice

an article by Marilyn A. Cornish, Nathaniel G. Wade, Jeritt R. Tucker and Brian C. Post (Iowa State University, Ames, USA) published in The Counseling Psychologist Volume 42 Number 5 (July 2014)

Abstract

Religion is a diversity factor that comprises a significant component of identity for many clients. However, little attention has been paid to religion in the context of group counselling, especially process-oriented, non-themed groups with heterogeneous membership.

Using multicultural, process-oriented, and social justice theories of groups, we demonstrate the myriad ways religion is relevant to and influential in group counseling work. Together, these theories provide a solid justification for the need to ethically and effectively attend to religion in group work.

Furthermore, they provide a strong foundation for developing counseling expertise in this area by highlighting typical conflicts, group dynamics, and needs that arise when religion is addressed in groups.

Based on our review, we provide practical and ethical implications to assist group leaders in addressing religion in their group counselling work.

Trivia (should have been 15 November)

The In Crowd: 1943
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

October 1943. Washington, D.C.
“Sally Dessez talking with some friends near her locker at Woodrow Wilson High School”
Popular girls and their minion
Photo by Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information
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The Anatomy of Attention
via 3 Quarks Daily Alan Lightman in The New Yorker

Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within. The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain every second. The ears receive another avalanche of sounds. Then there are the fragments of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, that race from one neuron to the next. Much of this data seems random and meaningless. Indeed, for us to function, much of it must be ignored. But clearly not all. How do our brains select the relevant data? How do we decide to pay attention to the turn of a doorknob and ignore the drip of a leaky faucet? How do we become conscious of a certain stimulus, or indeed “conscious” at all?
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Silicon Valley philistinism
The world of high criticism is endangered. Not by academic mandarins, but rather by Silicon Valley philistines. Sean Wilentz explains… more

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A day at Cheltenham
via Times Online by Mary Beard
I had a great day at Cheltenham Literary Festival on Sunday. To be honest, Cheltenham is a bit of a schlepp from Cambridge, so my deal is to go there and back in a day – and I do as many gigs as anyone wants me to fit in (provided that it includes our now traditional "How to read a Latin poem" slot, with Peter Stothard and Llew Morgan).
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Great ideas that changed the world, and the people they rode in on
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
To inaugurate the publication of his brilliant new book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (also a PBS/BBC TV series), Steven Johnson has written about the difficult balance between reporting on the history of world-changing ideas and the inventors credited with their creation.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Willa Cather’s Letters
Willa Cather was against teaching colleges students how to write creatively, instead of how to write “clear and correct English”… more

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Johnson: Alleged carelessness
via Economist (Prospero blog) by R.L.G.

Journalists have a bad habit. Writing about people suspected of crimes is tricky in many ways, and one of them is conveying the level of facts legally proven to be true at the time of writing. Specifically, journalists too frequently use “alleged” as their own kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, attaching it to a noun that very much implies the suspect is guilty, without the journalist committing to it outright.
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Are we alone in the Universe?
via OUP Blog by David A Rothery
World Space Week has prompted myself and colleagues at the Open University to discuss the question: ‘Is there life beyond Earth?’
The bottom line is that we are now certain that there are many places in our Solar System and around other stars where simple microbial life could exist, of kinds that we know from various settings, both mundane and exotic, on Earth. What we don’t know is whether any life does exist in any of those places. Until we find another example, life on Earth could be just an extremely rare fluke. It could be the only life in the whole Universe. That would be a very sobering thought.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

From Wit to Twit(ter)
Wit can be charming or mean, whimsical or incisive. Done well, it mocks pretension, false self-esteem, snobbery. Wit is vital – and in decline… more

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Futility Closet 26: A Practical Joke on a Grand Scale
via Boing Boing

In 1810 someone told hundreds of London merchants that Mrs. Tottenham at 54 Berners Street had requested their services. She hadn't. For a full day the street was packed with crowds of deliverymen struggling to reach a single door – and the practical joker was never caught.
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