Seminar (Dept. of Organization and Human Resources)

Theme： I Am Telling You How I Feel: Investigating the Antecedents and Consequences of Bounded Emotion Sharing in Organizations

Speaker：Shuye Lu (School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University)

Time：2021-10-13 14:00

Address：Room 1008, Mingde Business Building

Language：Chinese/English

ABSTRACT：   

As social beings, people often share their emotional experiences with others. This phenomenon, termed social sharing of emotions (or emotion sharing) has been underexplored in organizational contexts in spite of its pervasive occurrence and the critical roles that it may serve as it is enabled or bounded by a web of social relationships and structures in organization. We draw on the social functional account of emotion to investigate the antecedents and outcomes of emotion sharing in the workplace, and the organizational contexts affecting these relationships. We tested several hypotheses by conducting an archival study with 916,176 emails from 358 employees in a U.S.-based high-tech firm during 1998–2003, and a laboratory experiment with 257 participants. In the archival study, we found that a shared event (i.e., the 9/11 attack in 2001) triggered employees’ emotion sharing in the workplace, and the impact of that shared event on emotion sharing was magnified by the strength of emotion sharing norms and the level of social proximity with coworkers in the organization. Furthermore, emotion sharing was found to be positively related to employees’ prosocial behaviors such as helping and voice but negatively related to turnover. These effects of emotion sharing on those behaviors were stronger for lower-ranking employees and weaker for higher-ranking employees in the organization. In the lab study, we replicated the effects of emotion sharing on participants’ willingness to help, voice, and quit. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.