Abstract
In the current U.S. socio-political climate, leaders are expected to be adept at confronting prejudice and stepping up as allies for marginalized groups. Leaders' emotions and social considerations can be critical in motivating or hindering allyship enactment. To explore this nascent area, this chapter offers a selective review of the research on emotion management in organizations and the role of emotions in leader-employee relationships, particularly when leaders serve as allies to marginalized group employees. Next, qualitative findings are presented from a secondary data analysis of an interview study conducted with exceptional leader-allies that explore: 1) negative emotions experienced by leader-allies in a prejudice context, 2) leader-allies' self-presentation concerns when expressing emotions in public versus private, 3) leader-allies' relational concerns about the consequences of confrontation, and 4) their plans for future emotion regulation. Finally, implications of the role of emotion and social regulation among leader-allies in prejudice confrontation are discussed.
TopTheoretical Background And Literature Review
History of Emotion Management in Organizations
Leaders’ Disconnection from Employees’ Emotional Labor
Within the organizational realm, research on emotions in the workplace emerged from an examination of emotion management or emotion regulation, which is the ability to control one’s own emotions when situations, people, or events make emotional demands (Troth et al., 2018). Generally, emotion regulation in the workplace has been conceptualized at the individual level (employing strategies to regulate one’s own emotions) and the interpersonal level (employing strategies to regulate and manage others’ emotions), with interpersonal emotion regulation (e.g., emotional labor) becoming a burgeoning research stream in more recent literature (Troth et al., 2018). Emotional labor is most common in service work contexts where employees are required to be attentive to the emotional needs of customers, often matching external emotional displays in order to receive higher service ratings (Hochschild, 1983; Verbeke, 1997). Much of the emotional labor research finds that surface displays of emotion, inherently tied to the suppression of authentic emotions, are associated with job dissatisfaction, emotional exhaustion, job stress, distress, and other negative psychological phenomena (Lee et al., 2021; Pugliesi, 1999).
The majority of these studies are conducted in the context of customer-employee interactions and often involve customer transgressions where, due to the need to please customers, prejudice confrontations are rare to non-existent. Further, with the majority of this research taking place in service contexts where expectations of emotional labor are placed on employees, leaders have been understudied because historically they have been disconnected from the process of emotion regulation or emotional side-effects of such employees (Ashforth & Humphrey, 1993; Mishra, 2014). As researchers are continuing to uncover a holistic approach to support organizational and employee wellbeing (e.g., Medina del Consuelo et al., 2018), leaders can no longer remain disconnected from the role of emotional expression and suppression in the workplace.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence, on the other hand, has received special attention within leadership contexts as a construct that can aid in mitigating negative emotions, increasing organizational citizenship behaviors and project success, and positively influencing employee emotions (George, 2000; Khalili, 2017; Maqbool et al., 2017). Both emotional labor and emotional intelligence have been studied for their role in developing effective strategies for navigating complex emotional situations. However, emotional labor literature has long been grounded in service industry demands (e.g., customer orientation) focused on emotion suppression for those who have low organizational power (Jiang et al., 2020; Morris & Feldmann, 1997) whereas emotional intelligence literature is often framed for leaders as a way to increase favorable outcomes in employees (see Table 1).
Table 1. Emotional labor, intelligence, and management themes
| Construct | Definition | Key literature |
| Emotional Labor | Situations where employees,
particularly in service occupations, are required to display emotions that differ from the emotions they may actually feel (Hochschild, 2012) | ● Given the nature of service work, employees must become skilled at projecting one emotion while feeling another (Hochschild, 2012)
● Displays of positive emotion by service clerks result in higher service ratings (Pugh, 2001)
● Emotional matching, or contagion, important in customer retention and service settings (Verbeke, 1997)
● Emotional labor is strongly related to job stress and distress (Pugliesi, 1999)
● On some occasions, leaders use emotional labor to regulate their emotions and manage followers (Humphrey, 2012)
● Emotional labor is strongly related with job dissatisfaction (Lee & Chelladurai, 2018)
● Faked displays of emotion on behalf of leaders result in emotional exhaustion via emotional labor (Lee et al., 2021)
● Emotion work increases psychological depletion, such that employees are committed more out of fear or obligation than intrinsic motivation at more severe rates (Akanji et al., 2015) |
| Emotional intelligence (EI) | Ability to perceive, express, understand, and reason with emotion as well as regulate emotion in the self
(Salovey & Mayer, 1990) | ● EI leads to outstanding performance of leaders (Goleman, 1998)
● Leaders high in EI impact individual and group EI (Cherniss, 2001)
● Leaders can better understand and influence followers’ emotions when high in EI (George, 2000)
● EI is associated with aspects of transformational leadership, indicating it is a key part of effective leadership (Palmer et al., 2001)
● EI is linked to project success via transformational leadership (Maqbool et al., 2017)
● EI and transformational leadership influence higher rates of organizational citizenship behaviors (Khalili, 2017)
● EI among leaders can develop innovation among employees by tuning into specific aspects of EI like social awareness and self-management (Kaur & Hirudayaraj, 2021) |
| Emotion management | Ability to maintain control when situation, people and events make emotional demands | ● Emotional leadership can have a positive impact on employee mental health (Gu, et al., 2020)
● Leaders’ positive affect linked to positive employee customer service performance whereas negative affect linked to negative performance (Jiang et al., 2020)
● Authentic leadership, or positive emotion management, influences emotional labor strategies of employees through connecting with the energy level of employees (Wang & Xie, 2020) |
Attention to the experience and expression of leaders’ own emotions and those of others (i.e., emotional intelligence) has been studied as a way to improve leaders’ effectiveness and influence (George, 2000). However, emotion management strategies for leaders are often portrayed as ‘nice to do’ but not necessarily a core component of the job. In certain contexts though, leaders’ emotional expression or lack thereof may be critical for the organization’s or team’s functioning, and for the leader’s own standing. In particular, emotionally intelligent leadership may be a critical influence on employees’ mental health and wellbeing, factors that contribute to job satisfaction and employee retention (Gu et al., 2021). Moreover, employees from marginalized social groups (e.g., people of color, women, LGBTQ+-identifying individuals) often have lower levels of job satisfaction, mental health, and perceptions of belonging in the workplace compared to their non-marginalized counterparts (Holman, 2018; Vargas et al., 2020). With a new wave of public consciousness surrounding the experiences and treatment of marginalized individuals who are vulnerable to negative workplace and social transgressions, it is useful for leaders to critically reflect on emotion and social regulation behaviors that can provide support for marginalized groups.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Workplace Injustice: Events that involve the undermining, belittling, dismission of, or hostility or unfairness towards employees who possess vulnerable, marginalized identities.
Social Justice: Equity and liberation that is centered in social issues involving race, gender, class, sexuality, and other marginalized social identities.
Transgressor: A person who engages in a violation of safety against another person on the basis of some aspect of their social identity (e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation), perpetrating prejudice, bias, discrimination, or other behaviors like microaggressions, violence, damaging gossip, and other harmful acts.
Observer: Anyone who is exposed to or aware of the transgressor’s behavior and actions, and/or (in)action of the ally.
Leader-Allies: Dominant group members who are situated in a position of power within an organization and are dedicated to ending discrimination through support of and as advocates for marginalized group coworkers.
Social Emotion Management: Emotion management involving more than one person resulting in a change to the other person's emotion through upward or downward emotion regulation.